Interact robot hand. Credits: ESA

Interact robot hand. Credits: ESA

Update: the experiment is over for today, Andreas put the peg in the hole.

Flight day 6, Monday 7 September 2015, will be an exciting day as Andreas Mogensen will operate a robotic arm from space.

With Interact, ESA’s Telerobotics and Haptics team aims to validate advanced robotic control developed for future exploration programmes.

Andreas will push a mechanical connector into a taskboard’s receptacle that only allows tolerance of 150 micrometres. He will use a force-feedback bilateral control system on the International Space Staion to perform this task with the Interact Centaur robot at ESA’s technical heart ESTEC. The round-trip network time delay by satellite will be around 850 milliseconds between but the system will send Andreas’s commands to ground and relay the feeling back.

You can watch the live webcast here and read the live-blog from the team themselves from 09:00 GMT. The experiments are scheduled for 12:00 GMT, 14:10 GMT and 17:50 GMT.