Armadillo team members removed the legs from this rocket, Texel, and put them on its twin, Pixel, after Pixel’s legs broke off during a hard landing on Friday. But Pixel toppled over during a landing on Saturday morning (Image: Kelly Young)
Armadillo Aerospace’s second attempt to win $350,000 for a timed flight of their mock lunar lander did not go as planned on Saturday morning. Their rocket, Pixel, landed on its side off the launch pad, kicking up a lot of dust.
It is not clear whether the vehicle was damaged in the landing.
The attempt was part of a bid to capture the $350,000 “level 1” prize of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Wirefly X Prize Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico, US. NASA is sponsoring the prize to spur the development of rockets that could land on, then take off from, the Moon.
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They have another launch window from 1200 to 1430 MDT (1800 to 2030 GMT) on Saturday. But they may not attempt to make that window if Pixel was damaged in the rough landing. There were no fuel leaks in the mishap.
Level 1 of the competition involves vertically launching a rocket to a height of 150 feet (50 metres). To win, it must hover for 90 seconds as it flies to a second launch pad. There, it can be refuelled before attempting the same thing in reverse. Both segments of the flight must be completed in 2.5 hours.
Pixel made another attempt on Friday, launching vertically from one pad and translating over to another pad before landing. Their entire flight lasted 92 seconds, surpassing the 90-second flight requirement.
New legs
But they could not complete the return trip because Pixel had been damaged when it landed, hitting the ground at 2.1 metres per second instead of the planned 1.5 metres per second.
The hard landing caused its small legs to break off, and some flames came up when it hit the ground, frying some of its wiring.
Team members fixed Pixel overnight by replacing its legs with those of a similar vehicle called Texel. They also fixed the wiring and tweaked the flight control software to try to avoid another hard landing.
Armadillo, based in Mesquite, Texas, US, is the only team competing in the challenge this year – three other teams registered but could not get their vehicles perfected in time.
Pixel is comprised of four spherical fuel and oxidiser tanks that are each about 1 metre in diameter, while the entire rocket is a squat 2 metres tall. It cost a total of about $50,000, with about $40,000 going just for the computer.
The vehicle weighs 600 pounds (270 kilograms) empty and 2000 pounds (910 kg) when fuelled.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
