A stellar nursery nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula has been captured in crisp detail by NASA's Webb telescope, revealing hitherto unseen features that deepen scientific understanding, the agency said Tuesday.

Officially known as 30 Doradus, the region of space is characterized by its dusty filaments that resemble the legs of a hairy spider, and has long been a favorite for astronomers interested in star formation.

Thousands of young stars, distant background galaxies, and the detailed structure of the nebula's gas and dust structures were viewable for the first time thanks to Webb's high resolution infrared instruments.

On September 12, 1962, then US president John F Kennedy informed the public of his plan to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.

It was the height of the Cold War and America needed a big victory to demonstrate its space superiority after the Soviet Union had launched the first satellite and put the first man in orbit.

"We choose to go to the Moon," Kennedy told 40,000 people at Rice University, "because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

Sixty years on, the United States is about to launch the first mission of its return program to the Moon, Artemis. But why repeat what has already been done?

Criticism has risen in recent years, for example from Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, and the Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, who have long advocated for America to go directly to Mars.

Today NASA uses wheeled rovers to navigate the surface of Mars and conduct planetary science, but research involving Texas A&M University scientists will test the feasibility of new surface-exploration technology: walking robots.

Ryan Ewing, Robert R. Berg Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M, and Marion Nachon, associate research scientist in geology and geophysics, are co-investigators on the project supported by NASA and led by Feifei Qian, a WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering. The aim of the research is to create and test walking, or "legged," robots that could more easily glide through icy surfaces, crusted sand and other difficult-to-navigate environments, thus significantly enhancing scientists' abilities to gather information from planetary bodies.

While the Mars Exploration Rovers and other robots have been successfully sent into space, they typically operate based on pre-programmed agendas that require human scientists and engineers to input detailed instructions regarding where to go and what to do prior to the robots' arrival at the planet.