Hasta La Gadget!

She called it a date, but as far as we can tell, the meeting between MSNBC reporter Stephanie Pappas and soon-to-be the first humanoid robot in space Robonaut 2 was a bit of a one-sided affair.

A joint project between General Motors and NASA, Robonaut 2 is expected to help astronauts perform repairs and other maintenance on the International Space Station. This model, Robonaut 2B will travel on the very last Space Shuttle mission; Originally scheduled a November 1 launch, fuel leaks have delayed the Shuttle Discovery blast-off until Tuesday of next week.

Pappas, who met the robot at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, reports that the 330 pound automaton was a little intimidating and looked as if it might be “ready to throw a punch.” It does look a tiny bit like a giant version of one of those punching puppets (our favorites were always the nun and ET) . Though only a torso, Robonaut 2 can replicate human hand and arm movement and perform tasks such as drilling and painting. During Pappas’ date, however, Robonaut didn’t paint, throw a punch, speak or even move. To be fair, Pappas’s date is not the robot heading into space. The final model, Robonaut 2B, has new fire-proof skin and a few space-ready parts. Plus, as Pappas notes, it doesn’t have any smell. (Now you know the answer to the age-old-question, “Do things still smell in space?”).

As Pappas’ date neared its conclusion, the reporter did manage to make brief contact with the humanoid robot’s arm. She reports that it felt like a “cross between a memory-foam pillow and a well-muscled human arm.”

We’re taking bets on whether or not Robonaut will call Pappas, or at least text her.

This time last year, NASA’s LCROSS mission sent a probe crashing into a lunar crater, in hopes of kicking up evidence of water on the moon. According to some new data, the scientists got a lot more than they bargained for–the crash kicked up high concentrations of silver and mercury, as well.

Scientists have found trace amounts of those elements on lunar rocks sent back to earth in the past, but nothing so far has suggested that they are so prevalent on the lunar surface. Scientists believe that the existence of the elements offers a clue as to how water first arrived on the moon.

“The silver is like a tracer,” Peter Schultz, the leader of the study told National Geographic. “It tells us where [moon water] probably came from, and I think it’s telling us that it came from comets and asteroids colliding with the moon.”

According to an article in the latest issue of the weekly science journal Nature, a newly discovered galaxy has “smashed the record for the most distant object ever observed. The galaxy is more than 4 billion parsecs away. A parsec, for those keeping track, is roughly 19 trillion miles.

The galaxy was discovered using spectroscopic observations in a patch of sky that scientists have deemed the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The sheer distance of the thing offers scientists some insight into the early days of our universe.

Says Nature,

The object sheds light on the nature of the sources that stripped electrons from hydrogen atoms during the reionization epoch.

Mankind is safe. For now. Earlier this week, an asteroid whizzed by our little blue planet–dangerously close, at least in astronomical terms. The rock flew above a section of Southeast Asia by Singapore. At around 6:51 AM ET, it was at its closest to the planet–around 28,000 miles away.

The asteroid, 2010 TD54 was first discovered on October 9th, by scientists in Arizona at a NASA-sponsored lab.

The rock was pretty small–33 feet across at most, according to the MIT scientists who were monitoring it. Even if it was headed toward Earth, we likely would have been okay. The asteroid would have almost certainly burned up when it entered the atmosphere.

It was fun while it lasted, right? All of that talk of giving up on Earth and just starting over again with a new planet, some 20 light years away. Hopefully you didn’t burn any irreparable bridges late last month when scientists announced the existence of Gliese581g, a so-called “Goldilocks” planet that was theoretically the right size and distance from the sun to potentially support human life.

Turns out that Gliese581g may actually just be a whole lot of noise–quite literally, in fact. During a meeting of the International Astronomical Union this week, Geneva-based astronomer Francesco Pepe questioned the existence of the planet, stating, “despite the extreme accuracy of the instrument and the many data points, the signal amplitude of this potential fifth planet is very low and basically at the level of the measurement noise.”

Pepe isn’t willing to rule out the possibility that the existence of the “planet” is, in fact, just an error. “Simulations on the real data have shown that the probability that such a signal is just produced ‘by chance’ out of the noise is not negligible, of the order of several percents,” he told the organization. “Under these conditions we cannot confirm the presence of the announced planet Gliese 581g.”

In the meantime, I’d hold off from destroying our own planet as much as possible–you know, just in case…