NASA's Gecko-Inspired Robots Can Climb Pretty Much Anything

You're so hard to explore. Sometimes you bombard spacecrafts with hurtling rocks and deadly cosmic rays, and other times you're so empty you don't give astronauts a darn thing to hold on to. But while scientists haven't quite figured out how to keep radiation at bay, the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory--specifically, its Planetary Robotics Laboratory--are building machines that can get a grip on the most difficult surfaces astronauts will find out there. Adhesion-wise, space presents a couple problems. First, robots typically struggle with uneven surfaces, let alone the kind of cliffs and crags you see on Mars.