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NASA’s Humanoid Robonaut 2 Waltz Both Elegant and Creepy (Video)

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NASA's robot butler for astronauts, Robonaut 2, may still be waiting for its legs to be delivered to the International Space Station, but you can see how the humanoid automaton may dance in weightlessness with an eerie elegance in this new video.

The video waltz of NASA's Robonaut 2, set to the "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss, was created by SPACE.com by stitches together a series of NASA recordings of the droid's prehensile leg tests.

The $2.5 million Robonaut 2, also called R2, is designed to eventually work with the astronauts and even take over some of their duties both inside and outside the space station. An R2 unit launched to the orbiting outpost as just a torso with arms and camera-equipped head during the last flight of the space shuttle Discovery in 2011. [See more photos of NASA's Robonaut 2 humanoid robot]

Since then, the R2 unit has been performing tests and experiments in a stationary position inside the space station, but it's expected to be able to move around alongside the astronauts after it gets its legs sometime this year.

Though humanoid in form, Robonaut 2's legs move in some unnervingly inhuman ways. Instead of one knee, r2 has seven joints that bend in all different directions, and watching its legs move is almost like watching a horrible football injury in slow motion.

When fully extended, the automaton's legs will span 9 feet (2.7 meters), according to NASA. And R2 doesn't have feet. Instead, it has special tools called "end effectors" that will allow it to use sockets and handrails to climb around inside and outside the station. NASA officials, however, have said that R2's upper body still needs some upgrades before it will be ready to venture into the vacuum of space.

Last month, NASA unveiled its latest humanoid robot Valkyrie, or R5. The 6-foot, 2-inch tall (1.9 meters) robot, which has an uncanny resemblance to the Marvel superhero Iron Man, was built to compete in the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge for disaster-response robots in December.

Follow Megan Gannon onTwitterandGoogle+. Follow us @SPACEdotcom, FacebookorGoogle+. Originally published onSPACE.com.

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NASA's Humanoid Robonaut 2 Waltz Both Elegant and Creepy (Video)

NASA Instruments on European Comet Spacecraft Begin Activation Countdown

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Three NASA science instruments are being prepared for check-out operations aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, which is set to become the first to orbit a comet and land a probe on its nucleus in November.

Rosetta was reactivated Jan. 20 after a record 957 days in hibernation. U.S. mission managers are scheduled to activate their instruments on the spacecraft in early March and begin science operations with them in August. The instruments are an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph, a microwave thermometer and a plasma analyzer.

"U.S. scientists are delighted the Rosetta mission gives us a chance to examine a comet in a way we've never seen one before -- in orbit around it and as it kicks up in activity," said Claudia Alexander, Rosetta's U.S. project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The NASA suite of instruments will provide puzzle pieces the Rosetta science team as a whole will put together with the other pieces to paint a portrait of how a comet works and what it's made of."

Rosetta's objective is to observe the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko up close. By examining the full composition of the comet's nucleus and the ways in which a comet changes, Rosetta will help scientists learn more about the origin and evolution of our solar system and the role comets may have played in seeding Earth with water, and perhaps even life.

The ultraviolet imaging spectrograph, called Alice, will analyze gases in the tail of the comet, as well as the coma, the fuzzy envelope around the nucleus of the comet. The coma develops as a comet approaches the sun. Alice also will measure the rate at which the comet produces water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. These measurements will provide valuable information about the surface composition of the nucleus. The instrument also will measure the amount of argon present, an important clue about the temperature of the solar system at the time the comet's nucleus originally formed more than 4.6 billion years ago.

The Microwave Instrument for Rosetta Orbiter will identify chemicals on or near the comet's surface and measure the temperature of the chemicals and the dust and ice jetting out from the comet. The instrument also will see the gaseous activity in the tail through coma.

The Ion and Electron Sensor is part of a suite of five instruments to analyze the plasma environment of the comet, particularly the coma. The instrument will measure the charged particles in the sun's outer atmosphere, or solar wind, as they interact with the gas flowing out from the comet while Rosetta is drawing nearer to the comet's nucleus.

NASA also provided part of the electronics package the Double Focusing Mass Spectrometer, which is part of the Swiss-built Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) instrument. ROSINA will be the first instrument with sufficient resolution to separate two molecules with approximately the same mass: molecular nitrogen and carbon monoxide. Clear identification of nitrogen will help scientists understand conditions at the time the solar system was born.

U.S. science investigators are partnering on several non-U.S. instruments and are involved in seven of the mission's 21 instrument collaborations. NASA has an American interdisciplinary scientist involved in the research. NASA's Deep Space Network is supporting the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Ground Station Network for spacecraft tracking and navigation.

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NASA Instruments on European Comet Spacecraft Begin Activation Countdown


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