Robonaut joins humans on shuttle Discovery's historic last space flight by shuttle Discover

More than a quarter-century after its first launch from Cape Canaveral, Nasa's space shuttle Discovery will be fired into the heavens for one final time next week before being grounded for good as a museum piece.

The American space agency, however, is determined to use the occasion to showcase some futuristic new technology rather than dwell too much on the spacecraft's illustrious past. In a scene that could come straight from Star Wars, a fully dexterous, humanoid robot will make its first appearance in orbit during Discovery's 11-day mission to the international space station.

Robonaut 2, or R2 as fellow astronauts know America's newest space traveller, is designed to work side-by-side with humans on a variety of maintenance tasks and science projects.

Built in a partnership between Nasa and the car-maker General Motors, it will be able to move around the space station and even make spacewalks for outside repairs. For now, the prototype, which comprises a head, torso and two arms with hands and fingers, will stay in the station's Destiny laboratory.

"Robonaut was designed to be a human assistant, the same way a nurse would be to a doctor in an operating room," said Nic Radford, the project's deputy manager.

"You can think of Robonaut as helping a human worker set up a work site, tear down a work site, hand him a tool. We want to use it in the same exact way in the space station, utilise the same connectors, the same tools and do the same sorts of tasks that the astronauts can do."

• The 142 million mile story

Mr Radford said one of the hardest parts of the project was preparing the robot to withstand the vibrations of Discovery's launch and two-day journey to the space station, where R2 will be unpacked from a padded crate and assembled.

Astronauts Tim Kopra and Alvin Drew will perform two spacewalks during the mission to bolt it on and perform a number of other assembly and maintenance tasks.

When Discovery lands again at Florida's Kennedy Space Centre, planned for 12 November, the orbiter will have spent more than 360 days in space, made 5,000 orbits of the Earth and travelled more miles than any other manned spacecraft.

It will eventually go on show at Washington's Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.