The Vera C. Rubin Observatory starts its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time with a new cosmic time-lapse—while a team builds diving “cyborg” cockroaches for hours underwater, and NASA awards 2028 Moon Base payload delivery contracts worth nearly $600 mill
On June 30, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile began filming what its backers are calling the greatest cosmic movie ever made. Over the next ten years. the observatory will sweep the southern sky with relentless cadence—capturing a new image roughly every 40 seconds and returning to the same patch of sky again and again. every few nights.
The setting is extreme by design. Inside the observatory sits the largest digital camera in the world, built to take images at 3,200 megapixels. In its survey kickoff. the campaign’s goals were laid out in the language of scale: its observations will “create an ultrawide. ultrahigh-definition time-lapse record of the universe.”.
Rubin already proved it could deliver. During a test run last summer. it captured its first images. showing millions of galaxies and stars—and thousands of previously unseen asteroids. Now the full Legacy Survey of Space and Time. or LSST. is set to run for a decade. revisiting each point in the sky roughly 800 times to track changes and cosmic events. The observatory will take about a thousand images per night, producing about ten terabytes of data daily.
The scientific stakes are being framed as both grand and practical. Brian Stone of the National Science Foundation said at the announcement. “Today. we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made.” Darío Gil. Under Secretary for Science at the US Department of Energy. added that Rubin is “embarking on a mission that will redefine modern cosmology and astrophysics.” Gil said the effort aims to understand dark energy and dark matter—“enigmatic phenomena” that. in his words. will help reveal “the fundamental laws that govern our existence.”.
Once Rubin’s camera starts its nightly flood of images. another kind of engineering effort is already testing survival at a different frontier. This week in Research That Makes My Skin Crawl. scientists from Nanyang Technological University Singapore and Waseda University announced that they’ve developed a tiny diving suit enabling cyborg cockroaches—specifically living Madagascar hissing cockroaches fitted with electronic controllers—to swim underwater for hours at a time.
The “why” is unromantic: search and rescue. The team says cyborg insects could be used to access spaces that are inaccessible to humans, animals, and larger robots. They also note that cyborg roaches were deployed in the field for the first time to assist with search and rescue efforts after a devastating earthquake in Myanmar this spring.
A flooded environment would normally be a no-go for the roaches. With the suit, it becomes survivable. The flexible diving suit includes an oxygen-generation tank. a flexible shell. and four silicone supply tubes attached to the roaches’ spiracles—openings they breathe through. The researchers say the tubes can be removed painlessly afterward without harming the roach.
In a paper published this week in Nature Communications, the researchers reported that the cyborg robots were able to swim underwater for up to 3 hours with the setup in tests.
That mix of ambition and specifics is also showing up in NASA’s latest step toward its own long-term plan. Earlier this year. NASA announced it was pausing its plans for an orbiting Lunar Gateway space station and instead moving ahead with a $20 billion Moon Base. For that bigger roadmap. the first three missions to deliver payloads to the lunar surface were scheduled to happen before the end of 2026.
This week, NASA announced four more missions heading to the moon, scheduled for late 2028. The agency says it awarded contracts totaling nearly $600 million to Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines. Astrobotic will make two trips to the moon; Firefly and Intuitive Machines will each make one.
These deliveries will use updated versions of each company’s lander designs. building on lessons from earlier missions under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The science payloads will be the same for each delivery: a Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) to collect landing data. a Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) for precision in determining a spacecraft’s location in lunar orbit or on the lunar surface. and a Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) for measuring energy from incoming space radiation.
The repetition is intentional. Joel Kearns. deputy associate administrator for exploration. Science Mission Directorate. at NASA Headquarters. said. “By flying the same science instruments on multiple landers. we will better understand potential hazards during landing and build out a global network of environmental data and location markers on the Moon.” Kearns likened the approach to Earth: “It’s akin to having weather stations in different locations on Earth.” He added that the three payloads are “flight-proven” and that their data is “critical to supporting safe human exploration of the lunar surface.”.
Put together. the week’s stories all point to the same kind of engineering rhythm—systems built to keep working. returning again and again. Rubin is set to revisit the sky roughly 800 times per point over a decade. roaches are fitted to breathe and survive underwater for up to 3 hours. and NASA is sending the same instrument suite to multiple lunar landers in late 2028. Each effort is chasing a different frontier. but each one is built around the same promise: more observations. more trials. and more chances to see what we missed the first time.
Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST Legacy Survey of Space and Time dark energy dark matter cyborg cockroaches Nanyang Technological University Waseda University Nature Communications search and rescue NASA Moon Base CLPS Astrobotic Firefly Aerospace Intuitive Machines SCALPSS LRA LETS