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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy expects a positive response from Western allies in Brussels to his requests for a rapid increase in military aid as the country's cities faces more Russian missile strikes.

After intense Russian missile attacks, Zelenskiy appealed to the leaders of the Group of Seven nations on Tuesday for more air defence capabilities as the G7 vowed to support Kyiv for "as long as it takes."

A US-led coalition of some 50 countries known as the Ukraine Defence Contact Group will meet in Brussels on Wednesday on the sidelines of a NATO defence ministers meeting.

"I am anticipating from our partners progress on matters of anti-aircraft and anti-missile defences and agreements on new supplies of different weapons and ammunition vital for us," Zelenskiy said in an evening address on Tuesday.

The Ukrainian military, which has recaptured significant territory from Russian forces in the past month, said on Tuesday night that Russian missile strikes had damaged more than 10 cities, including Lviv, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Zaporizhzhia.

"Over the past 24 hours, the occupiers have again resorted to mass missile strikes: more than 30 cruise missiles, seven air strikes and 25 instances of shelling," Ukraine's armed forces said.

The Ukrainian command said its forces killed more than 100 Russian troops in the southern Kherson region.

The activity on Tuesday was less intense than the day before when dozens of strikes killed 19 people, wounded more than 100 and knocked out power across the country in Moscow's biggest aerial offensive since the start of its invasion on February 24.

More missile strikes on Tuesday killed seven people in the southeastern Ukrainian town of Zaporizhzhia, a presidential aide said, and left part of the western city of Lviv without power, according to local officials.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov celebrated the arrival from the United States of four additional High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, whose accuracy and longer-range have allowed Ukraine to reduce Russia's artillery advantage and fuelled the country's recent counteroffensive.

"HIMARS time," he wrote on Twitter, was a "good time for Ukrainians and bad time for the occupiers".

Ukraine on Tuesday received the first of four IRIS-T air defence systems Germany promised to supply, a German defence ministry source said. The United States said it was speeding up the shipment of sophisticated NASAMS air defences to Ukraine. Washington has already provided more than $US16.8 billion ($A27 billion) worth of security aid to Ukraine during the war.

The G7 - which groups the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Britain, Italy and Canada - pledged continued "financial, humanitarian, military, diplomatic and legal support ... for as long as it takes" to Ukraine.

It also condemned "indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilian populations" as war crimes and said Russian President Vladimir Putin would be held to account for them.

Putin was a "rational actor who has miscalculated significantly", US President Joe Biden said in a CNN interview.

Moscow, which calls its actions in Ukraine a "special military operation" to eliminate dangerous nationalists and protect Russian speakers, has accused the West of escalating and prolonging the conflict by supporting Kyiv.

Kyiv and its Western backers accuse Russia of an unprovoked land grab in Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was open to talks with the West, a claim Washington dismissed as "posturing" because Russia has continued to strike Ukrainian cities.

In an interview on state television, Lavrov said Russia was willing to engage with the United States or with Turkey on ways to end the war but had yet to receive any serious proposal to negotiate. Zelenskiy on Tuesday again ruled out peace talks with Putin.

The Russian president, under domestic pressure to ramp up the war as his forces have lost ground since early September, said he ordered Monday's strikes as a response to an explosion that damaged Russia's bridge to annexed Crimea last weekend.

Ukrainian authorities said they exhumed the bodies of dozens of people, including civilians and a one-year-old baby, following the retreat of Russian troops from two towns in the eastern Donetsk region.

© DPA 2022

The spacecraft that NASA deliberately crashed into an asteroid last month succeeded in nudging the rocky moonlet out of its natural orbit - the first time humanity has altered the motion of a celestial body - NASA officials say.

The $US330 million ($A521 million) proof-of-concept mission, which was seven years in development, also marked the world's first test of a planetary defence system designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with earth.

Findings of telescope observations unveiled at a NASA news briefing in Washington confirmed the suicide test flight of the DART spacecraft on September 26 achieved its primary objective: changing the direction of an asteroid through sheer kinetic force.

Measurements showed the target asteroid was bumped slightly closer to the larger parent asteroid it orbits in space and that its orbital period was shortened by 32 minutes.

"This is a watershed moment for planetary defence and a watershed moment for humanity," NASA chief Bill Nelson told reporters on Tuesday. "It felt like a movie plot, but this was not Hollywood."

Last month's impact, 10.9 million kilometres from earth, was monitored from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where the spacecraft was designed and built for NASA.

The celestial target of the DART flight was an egg-shaped asteroid named Dimorphos, roughly the size of a football stadium, that was orbiting a parent asteroid about five times bigger called Didymos once every 11 hours, 55 minutes.

The aim was to fly the DART impactor vehicle - no bigger than a refrigerator - directly into Dimorphos at 22,531km/h, creating enough force to shift the moonlet's orbit closer to its larger companion.

Comparison of pre- and post-impact measurements of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair showed the orbital period was shortened to 11 hours, 23 minutes.

Tom Statler, DART program scientist for NASA, said the collision also left Dimorphos "wobbling a bit", but additional observations were needed to confirm that.

The outcome "demonstrated we are capable of deflecting a potentially hazardous asteroid of this size", if it were discovered well enough in advance, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's planetary science division.

Neither of the asteroids involved, nor DART itself - short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test - posed any actual threat to earth, NASA scientists said.

But Nancy Chabot, DART's co-ordination lead at APL, said Dimorphos "is a size of asteroid that is a priority for planetary defence".

A Dimorphos-sized asteroid, while not capable of posing a planet-wide threat, could level a major city with a direct hit.

Scientists had predicted the DART impact would shorten Dimorphos' orbital path by at least 10 minutes but would have considered a change as small as 73 seconds a success. So the actual change of more than a half hour exceeded expectations.

Launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, DART made most of its voyage under the guidance of flight directors, with control handed over to the craft's autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey.

© RAW 2022

Almost 200,000 people who spent years fighting to clear welfare debts they didn't owe will have any active Centrelink investigations wiped.

The federal government will scrap the cases of robodebt victims still under review, with any potential debt no longer being pursued.

About 124,000 people were told they were under review for social security payments they had received, while another 73,000 were never informed they were under investigation for potential debts.

The cases were put on hold in 2019 after concerns were raised about the robodebt scheme.

The 197,000 people will soon receive letters informing them the investigations will not proceed.

Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said clearing the outstanding cases would offer certainty to any Australians with reviews hanging over their heads.

Ms Rishworth said pursuing the cases would be expensive and time-consuming and would undermine public confidence in the welfare system.

"The robodebt fiasco is something that should be of deep concern to all Australians," she said.

"We know it had a significant human cost."

Government Services Minister Bill Shorten said the government was committed to cleaning up the "shameful and illegal" scheme.

"We are removing any doubt that has been hanging over the heads of robodebt victims for almost a decade," he said.

"These dodgy debts were raised by the former government in an illegal shakedown against some of the most vulnerable people to underpin their discredited surplus forecast."

The unlawful debt recovery scheme started in 2015 and falsely accused welfare recipients of owing money to the government.

More than $750 million was wrongfully recovered from 381,000 people.

A royal commission into the robodebt scheme will begin public hearings at the end of October.

© AAP 2022