Tesla boss Elon Musk presents humanoid robot Optimus Tech billionaire Elon Musk has presented the latest prototype of a humanoid robot being developed by his Tesla electric car company. Optimus appeared on stage at a Silicon Valley event, where it waved to the audience and raised its knees. The CEO said the robot was work-in-progress but could be on sale to the public in a few years' time. Tesla's mass-market robots will be tested by working jobs in the car factories, company engineers say. The prototype was wheeled on stage during an annual Tesla AI [artificial intelligence] Day presentation..

NASA successfully collided a small spacecraft into an asteroid on Sept. 26 to test its ability to defend Earth from potential asteroids. The asteroid, Dimorphos, is the size of a stadium — or the Great Pyramid of Giza, as one scientist put it Monday — and is about 7 million miles from Earth at the moment. It orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos. Neither poses a threat to our planet now or anytime in the foreseeable future. This was just a test, NASA’s first demonstration of a potential planetary defense technique, called a kinetic impactor. The idea is to give a hypothetically dangerous asteroid just enough of a blow to alter its orbital trajectory.

Finding water on the Moon could be easier with a Goddard technology that uses an effect called quantum tunneling to generate a high-powered terahertz laser, filling a gap in existing laser technology. Goddard engineer Dr. Berhanu Bulcha said a type of instrument called a heterodyne spectrometer could zoom in on particular frequencies to definitively identify and locate water sources on the Moon. It would need a stable, high-powered, terahertz laser, which was prototyped in collaboration with Longwave Photonics through NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

With giant storms, powerful winds, auroras, and extreme temperature and pressure conditions, Jupiter has a lot going on. Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of the planet. Webb’s Jupiter observations will give scientists even more clues to Jupiter’s inner life. “We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. De Pater led the observations of Jupiter with Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory, as part of an international collaboration for Webb’s Early Release Science program. Webb itself is an international mission led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). “It’s really remarkable that we can see details on Jupiter together with its rings, tiny satellites, and even galaxies in one image,” she said.