Robonaut 2 arrives at KSC ahead of Discovery flight

Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot scheduled to fly to the International Space Station this fall as Discovery's "seventh" crew member, arrived at Kennedy Space Center this morning.

The 300-pound robot known as "R2" departed Johnson Space Center in Houston on Sunday by truck, and is scheduled to be removed from its shipping container Tuesday inside KSC's Space Station Processing Facility.

There, a special cage is being designed to pack R2 into the Leonardo cargo module that will sit in Discovery's payload bay during the flight targeted for Nov. 1 -- one of two remaining shuttle flights.

The relatively late arrival of Robonaut 2 is one of the reasons NASA earlier this summer decided to push back the target launch date from mid-September.

Developed by NASA and General Motors, R2 consists of a white torso with two arms and hands and a gold head.

On orbit, it is expected to perform mostly simple, repetitive tasks inside the station's Destiny lab. The robot is will remain in space indefinitely so engineers can test its performance in microgravity.

Read more about R2 here and follow its tweets here.

IMAGE: During a training session in the space vehicle mockup facility at the Johnson Space Center on June 28, the STS-133 crew is pictured with its seventh crew member -- Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot to travel to space and the first U.S.-built robot to visit the space station. Photo credit: NASA.