Space station astronaut Catherine Coleman unpacks Robonaut2. Photo Credit/NASA
International Space Station astronauts Catherine Coleman and Paolo Nespoli have unpacked Robonaut 2, the experimental humanoid delivered during the shuttle Discovery’s recent mission.
Robonaut 2 was unstowed on Tuesday, just before Scott Kelly, Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka departed the space station for Earth in a Russian Soyuz capsule.
“Can you see, what we see,” Coleman asked NASA’s Mission Control as she turned a camera on the unofficial new crew member. “Robonaut is out of the box.”
“Totally awesome,” responded Mission Control.
Robonaut was developed by NASA and General Motors to evaluate safe operations between astronauts and robots in space.
The first evaluations are likely several weeks away, said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring.
During early testing, Robonaut will likely pull knobs, move levers and turn knobs on a task board in the station’s U. S. Destiny laboratory.
Eventually, astronauts would like Robonaut to move about on its own, cleaning air filters and perhaps other tasks the astronauts would prefer to delegate.
Someday, an advanced version of Robonaut will take part in a spacewalk.
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