Context

The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing to send a robotic arm outside the planet to the International Space Station (ISS).

• The European Robotic Arm (ERA) is headed towards the Russian segment of the space station, where it will remain in service.

About

About the Robotic Arm

• The robotic arm is installed into the new Russian multipurpose laboratory module, also known as 'Nauka'.
• The module will be launched from the BaikonurCosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Proton rocket by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
• It is much like a human arm. It has an elbow, shoulders, and even wrists.
• The European Robotic Arm (ERA) is the first robot able to ‘walk’ around the Russian segment of the International Space Station.
• The orbital arm has the ability to anchor itself to the station and move back and forward by itself, hand-over-hand between fixed base-points.
• This space robot looks like a pair of compasses and has a length of over 11m. When stretched, it could pass a football from a penalty spot to the goalkeeper.
• The robotic arm in space will be able to handle multi-tonne payloads with a large range of motion for assembly tasks.
• 'Smart spacewalker' will serve as the "main manipulator" on the Russian segment of the International Space Station.

International Space Station A space station is essentially a large spacecraft which remains in low-earth orbit for extended periods of time. It is like a large laboratory in space, and allows astronauts to come aboard and stay for weeks or months to carry out experiments in microgravity. The ISS has been in space since 1998, and has been known for the exemplary cooperation between the five participating space agencies that run it: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).