Scary as HAL

I ran across a great article at ScienceNews wishing a happy 20th birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope. I highly recommend reading over the article, not only because it's well written and talks about the Hubble's interesting history, but also because it contains a link to a very nice slide show of Hubble's most iconic images. As it turns out, the article's author, Ron Cowen, has written some 940 articles on the 'astronomy,' 'planetary science,' and 'atoms and cosmos' beats for ScienceNews. The subjects of some of his more recent articles include the discovery and analysis of a planet outside of our solar system with a moderate temperature, the finding that a moon of Saturn may be capable of sustaining life, and updates on the Large Hadron Collider.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to make this post a short one, as I've got a lot on my plate preparing for the SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing conference next week. Before I go, though, I thought I'd leave you with this little tidbit: NASA, partnering with General Motors, has developed a new generation of dexterous robots designed for human assistance. You can read more about them here. Really, I'm not so sure that I would be comfortable working with a robot designed to assist human astronauts. After all, I've seen a little film called 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike the omnipresent HAL, though, these robots are humanoid. If I had to describe the way they look, I'd call it a cross between a storm trooper and Boba Fett. And the Star Wars references don't have to stop there. The robot is the second iteration in the Robonaut line of development. This means that they call it Robonaut 2, or R2 for short. Perhaps they should add specialized models to the line. Say, for instance, a dancing Robonaut. I'm sure the first design would only be able to complete simple repetitive movements, but surely the second design would be capable of complex and fluid break-dancing. And what would we call this robot? It would only be reasonable to name it Robonaut 2 - Dance 2, of course.

Or R2D2 for short.