NASA's 2026 Lunabotics challenge seeks a team or person to create a space robot able to move and build on the Moon's surface as the space agency gears up for future life in orbit part of its Artemis program.

Pac-Man, Mario, Tetris, The Legend of Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog are just some of the breakout franchises from this era—which also saw a few big flops, such as Atari's infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Another big boom came in the 1990s, however, with the PC and Mac gaming era growing fast alongside a new set of consoles.

NASA’s Valkyrie is undergoing tests to understand what it would take to get a humanoid robot onto offshore facilities or into space. New Scientist's James Woodford took the controls to see what it is

NASA's associate administrator for space science, Ed Weiler, is becoming more and more a believer that a robot could extend Hubble's life. He's even considering making the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope modular so robots could replace parts; the telescope will be launched in 2011 to a point 1 million miles from Earth, well beyond human reach.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk is of like mind. Earlier this year, Musk said that the company aims to launch a small, uncrewed fleet of its Starship megarockets toward Mars in late 2026, carrying Tesla Optimus humanoid robots to explore the Red Planet.

LASSIE (short for Legged Autonomous Surface Science in Analogue Environments) is a quadrupedal robot built by engineers at Temple University, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, the University of Pennsylvania, and Oregon State University, where roboticist Cristina Wilson is an assistant professor.