Humans have long dreamed of setting foot on the moon and other planetary bodies such as Mars. Since the 1960s, space travelers have donned suits designed to protect them from the vacuum of space and stepped out into the unknown.

However, the Polaris Dawn mission, which is to include the first spacewalk organized by a private company, has been delayed. This is due to complications with the design and development of a suitable spacesuit.

Moon suits are also one of the key elements of NASA's Artemis lunar program that have yet to be delivered. A report released in November 2023 said that the contractor making the suits is having to revisit aspects of the design provided by NASA, which could introduce delays.

Yet the first spacewalk, by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, took place in 1965. Later, 12 NASA astronauts would walk on the lunar surface, between 1969 and 1972, using technology that would be eclipsed by today's smartphones.

Construction and testing are complete on the CADRE rovers, which will map the lunar surface together as a tech demo to show the promise of multi-robot missions.

A trio of small rovers that will explore the moon in sync with one another are rolling toward launch. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California recently finished assembling the robots, then subjected them to a punishing series of tests to ensure they'll survive their jarring rocket ride into space and their travels in the unforgiving lunar environment.

In 1999, Michelle Nichols saw her first total solar eclipse on a cruise in the Black Sea. It would be many years before she witnessed another one during a visit to southern Illinois in 2017.

"It seemed so far in the future," she said.

Now, Nichols, an astronomer, educator and the director of public observing at the Adler Planetarium, is planning to return to Carbondale, Illinois, where the moon will completely block out the sun for more than four minutes on April 8. It is the second time in seven years that southern Illinois has been in the path of totality, or the moon's shadow.

Rarely do these celestial bodies line up perfectly with the earth to create a total eclipse. It's even rarer for a total eclipse to plunge the same region into darkness in less than a decade.

"Any given location on Earth will see an actual, total solar eclipse on average every 375 years," Nichols said. "So you have to be at the right place, at the right time."

While Chicago is not in the path of totality again this year, the area will experience a partial eclipse, and the sky will darken.

Packing to go to space is a lot like getting ready for a plane ride with only a carry-on bag. You have to maximize the use of the space in your bag at the same time you want to make sure you have what you need.

Space travel is complex, expensive, and risky. Great sums and valuable payloads are on the line every time one spacecraft docks with another. One slip and a billion-dollar mission could be lost. Aerospace engineers believe that autonomous control, like the sort guiding many cars down the road today, could vastly improve mission safety, but the complexity of the mathematics required for error-free certainty is beyond anything on-board computers can currently handle.

In a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in March 2024 and published on the preprint server arXiv, a team of aerospace engineers at Stanford University reported using AI to speed the planning of optimal and safe trajectories between two or more docking spacecraft.