By Mike Fahey

NASA's Robotic Spaceman Has A Twitter Addiction

Meet Robonaut 2, the most dexterous humanoid robot in existence, soon to be the first humanoid robot in space, and you'll be able to hear all about it through his Twitter account.

Created through a joint project between NASA and General Motors that began in 2007, Robonaut 2, or R2 for short, was originally planned as an Earth-bound prototype. Engineers being engineers, they decided they wanted to see how R2 fared in microgravity, so NASA is shooting the robot up into space on the next Discovery shuttle flight.

NASA mission STS-133, planned to launch on November 1 at 4:40PM Eastern, will carry R2 to the International <House of Pancakes Space Station, where it will communicate with the people of Earth via Twitter, where the robot is already an active and popular participant.

R2's Twitter page is already filled with messages, from July 29's "11 days til I leave for Kennedy Space Center. 96 days til I leave for space! I can't wait!" to humorous answers to fans' questions, like, " I also understand C++, C#, C and VHDL. But English is the only language I tweet in."

R2 and his team will be answering questions live via Twitter tomorrow morning at 10AM Central time, so if you've got questions, it might have answers, as long as you remember to include the #4R2 hash tag in their Tweets.

And don't worry about R2 contracting space madness and slaughtering the crew. He's only a torso, head, and arms, and he's not a big fan of HAL 9000.

"No, no relation to Hal. Don't know if I'd want to admit to having him on my family tree if I was. Def. don't condone his actions"

For more images of the Robonaut 2 in action, visit NASA's photo gallery.

NASA's Robotic Spaceman Has A Twitter Addiction