Late last week, NASA delivered a version of its six-foot-tall, 300-pound humanoid to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In November, NASA announced that it would give one Valkyrie humanoid, also called R5, to MIT and one to Northeastern University, along with $250,000 each, to advance the capabilities of the massively complex system. Valkyrie had a disappointing showing at the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge trials and didn't qualify for the finals, so its makers are looking for some outside help to get the robot, which has cost about $6M to develop so far, closer to mission-ready. The space agency hopes R5 will serve on long haul space missions, including those to Mars, both independently and alongside crew. A team of CSAIL researchers will program their new toy to autonomously perform a variety of tasks that would allow it to help or even replace astronauts on missions.