Feb 10 2015
Dentsu Inc. (TOKYO: 4324) (ISIN: JP3551520004) (President & CEO: Tadashi Ishii; Head Office: Tokyo; Capital: 74,609.81 million yen) announced today that Kirobo, the robot astronaut that spent eighteen months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), is scheduled to return to Earth tomorrow.
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the USA, Kirobo will board SpaceX’s CRS-5 Dragon cargo supply spacecraft at 7:09 p.m. on Tuesday, February 10 (Greenwich Mean Time) and leave the ISS. The spacecraft is expected to splash down in the Pacific Ocean at 0:44 a.m. on Wednesday, February 11 (Greenwich Mean Time). A debriefing session on Kirobo’s return to Japan is scheduled to be held in Japan in late March.
Kirobo and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata held the world’s first conversation experiment between a robot and a human in outer space, and conducted research for a future in which humans and robots coexist.
Robot astronaut Kirobo was developed under the KIBO ROBOT PROJECT, a joint research project carried out in collaboration with the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, ROBO GARAGE Co., Ltd., Toyota Motor Corporation, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Source: http://www.dentsu.com/