Bizarre smiling mechanical astronaut will journey to the heavens later this year (Photo: Airbus)

The International Space Station is about to get a brand new crew member.

Cimon is a floating ball-shaped robot with a smiling face who loves music and an appreciation of music and boasts a vocabulary of more than 1,000 sentences.

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Its name stands for ‘Short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion’ and Cimon is designed to zoom around the ISS offering technical help, warning of system failures and dangers.

The space machine has an artificially intelligent brain, an eight inch display screen and uses propeller-driven thrusters to help it travel around the in weightless conditions of space.


It is being developed by Airbus and the European Space Agency and will be launched into space later this year.

The happy looking machine is capable of talking to humans

Till Eisenberg, Project leader, said: “Cimon is a personal assistant capable of voice and facial recognition. We want to study the psychological effects of long space missions on crew members and try out suitable countermeasures, especially those that reduce stress.



“We will place special emphasis on data mining and interactions between humans and AI.”

Cimon (or Kimon) was the name of an Athenian general who fought against Persia in a series of decisive battles which allowed Ancient Greece to flourish and laid the groundwork for the whole of European civilisation.

If Greece had lost its fight against the brutal autocratic Persian regime, it’s unlikely that its democracy and culture would have survived – which means the UK and Europe may have been very different places.

Let’s hope Cimon’s robotic namesake has a similarly inspiring effect on humanity’s struggle to explore space.