General Motors/NASA

NASA and General Motors announced on Tuesday that they planned to send a robot to the International Space Station, with the eventual goal of having it help the astronauts there.

Although there are already several robots in space — including the famous Mars Rovers, which have been zipping around the red planet for years — NASA and G.M. said this would be the first human-like robot to leave Earth.

The robot is called Robonaut 2, or R2 for short, and it weighs in at 300 pounds, with a head, torso and two fully functional arms. At first, R2 will be monitored in space to see how it performs in weightlessness, but NASA hopes to eventually use R2 to assist astronauts during space walks and to work alongside engineers in the space station.

In a joint news release, John Olson, director of NASA’s Exploration Systems Integration Office, said, “The partnership of humans and robots will be critical to opening up the solar system and will allow us to go farther and achieve more than we can probably even imagine today.”

R2 will be a passenger on the Space Shuttle Discovery, which is scheduled to head to the space station in September.

The International Space Station received some attention in the blogosphere recently when Timothy Creamer, an astronaut on board, sent the first Tweet from space. It looks like Mr. Creamer may have a new roommate soon, although it is not yet clear if R2 is into Twitter.