This robot looks like the creature from the 1979 film Alien and is under six feet tall. It weighs in at 350 pounds and has been named Fedor. Fedor stands for ‘Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research.’
Fedor is being launched by the Russian space agency, Roscomos, and the final destination of this robot is the International Space Station. The mission that has been assigned to Fedor is testing a new emergency rescue system that has been incorporated into the Soyuz 2.1a rocket. Owing to the kind of test that it is conducting, only Fedor will be aboard the Soyuz MS-14 capsule that took off on Thursday morning and is headed for the ISS. Fedor is holding a Russian flag as it patiently waits.
The trip is going to be short and will last for only ten days. Fedor will be reaching the ISS by August 24 and will be back on Earth by September 7, that is if everything goes according to the plan. Fedor will be learning how to connect and disconnect electric cables by making use of ‘standard items from a screwdriver and a spanner to a fire extinguisher’ as per Alexander Bloshenko who is the Director for Prospective Programs and Science at Roscomos.
The Russians are hoping that Fedor will eventually be able to conduct even more dangerous tasks such as spacewalks. Fedor is not the first robot to have entered space, but he does possess his very own Twitter account. The US sent a robot to space back in 2011 and wanted to test it in high-risk environments. It flew back to Earth in 2018 after facing technical problems. Japan had also sent a robot to the ISIS in 2013.
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