The International Space Station (ISS) will soon have a new robotic arm that has been due for a long time. The European Robotic Arm (ERA) was built more than 30 years ago and couldn’t make it to the ISS during three planned missions due to technical glitches.

But now the ERA is ready to take a flight to the space laboratory from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan later this month. Speaking of the size, the robotic arm is 11 m long and has seven joints including “an elbow, shoulders, and even wrists,” making ERA the only such arm to work around the Russian segment of the ISS.

Handling payloads will be easy with the new robotic arm

“Light yet powerful, the orbital arm has the ability to anchor itself to the station and move back and forward by itself, hand-over-hand between fixed base-points,” the European Space Agency (ESA) said explaining the new machinery.

The seven joints on the ERA can handle multi-ton payloads and are agile enough to perform many tasks. As per ESA, the main objective of the arm is to install, remove, and replace experiment payloads and large elements of the space station. It will use its four cameras to inspect the outside of the ISS.

And then there were three!

The ERA can be controlled in real-time by the crew located inside or outside the ISS or operated through instructions given beforehand. “ERA’s first tasks in orbit, after deployment and checkouts, are to set up the airlock and install a radiator for the latest module of the space station,” ESA said.

As of now, the ISS has two robotic arms, Canada’s Canadarm2 and the Japanese Experiment Module Remote Manipulator System. Both of them help guide visiting spacecraft and also handle external payloads on the US and Japanese sections of the ISS. However, they cannot work on the Russian side of the station. The ERA will be launched for the ISS on July 15 and the docking is slated to happen on July 23. Besides, the ISS was recently installed with new solar panels.