Just 39 light-years away, seven planets, all roughly the size of Earth, whirl around a dim red star dubbed TRAPPIST-1, astronomers announced in February (SN: 3/18/17, p. 6). Three are potentially habitable. In April, a team reported the discovery of another world snuggled up to a red sun, LHS 1140b, described by researchers at the European Southern Observatory as perhaps the best candidate in the search for signs of life. And last August, astronomers revealed that not only does a small planet named Proxima b orbit the star closest to the sun, a red neighbor, but it too could support life (SN: 9/17/16, p. 6).

All of these worlds orbit faint ruddy stars known as M dwarfs, the most common type of star in the galaxy. Of the roughly 200 planets that have been spied around M dwarfs, dozens are in the coveted habitable zone. It’s this region around a star where a planet could have temperatures that support liquid water, widely considered an essential ingredient for life.

But M dwarfs are quite different from the sun, and their planets might be rough places to eke out a living — “the low-rent district of the galaxy,” says Victoria Meadows, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Harsh flares, bright beginnings and a tight gravitational grip on the innermost planets could be disastrous for any liquid water that’s available.

Many more planets are expected to be found in habitable zones around M dwarfs. So researchers want to get a better handle on what these planets are up against. New observations and computer simulations reveal that, while it’s difficult for M dwarf planets to hold on to substantial amounts of water, not all hope is lost.

“There are always ways around these things,” says astrophysicist Rory Barnes, also at the University of Washington. M dwarfs and their planet families are plentiful, and there are many conditions in which these worlds can grow and evolve. What’s becoming clear is that any habitable locales around these stars will probably be quite different from Earth.

Most strategies for sticking don’t work in space. Chemical adhesives can’t withstand the wide range of temperatures, and suction doesn’t work in a vacuum.

Adhesives inspired by gecko feet — which use van der Waals forces to cling without feeling sticky (SN Online: 11/18/14) — could fit the bill, says Mark Cutkosky of Stanford University, whose team has been designing such stickers for more than a decade. Now his team has built robotic gripper “hands” that can grapple objects many times their size without pushing them away, the researchers report June 28 in Science Robotics.

The team first tested the grippers in the Robo-Dome, a giant air hockey table at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where two 370-kilogram robots gently pushed each other around using a small square of gecko gripper.

Then last summer, Aaron Parness and Christine Fuller, of the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Hao Jiang of Stanford took the full gripper hand, which includes several patches of gripping material in a specific arrangement, on a microgravity flight in NASA’s Weightless Wonder aircraft. The team used the hand to grab and release a cube, cylinder and beach ball, which represented satellites, spent rockets or fuel tanks, and pressure vessels.

Gripper hands could be used to repair or move dead satellites, or help miniature satellites called CubeSats stick to larger spacecraft like barnacles, Parness says.

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