Gort on the International Space Station

There's no limit to what Gort could do. He could destroy the Earth ... or keep astronauts at the International Space Station company.

Gort, the humanoid robot from the 1951 sci-fi film The Day The Earth Stood Still is one of many secret messages and objects that you could find on the ISS today as it orbits the Earth. NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, who returned from a 5-month stint aboard the space station in May 2013, told Nancy Atkinson of Universe Today that there are many messages, signatures, and objects left aboard the station by its builders and previous crews:

“We did a lot of maintenance during our flight and rotated out a lot of the experiment racks and we saw many signatures on the internal hull or on the inside parts of the racks. Things like ‘Greetings from the Water Recovery team!’ with everyone’s signature. That’s fairly prevalent on the inside, particularly behind the racks, but not in plain view.”

Marshburn said about lil' Gort:

“There is a four-inch version of Gort, the robot figure from the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” stuck on the wall where we gather in the Destiny Lab for our daily planning conferences. He sometimes gets unstuck and floats around the ISS, so whenever we find him wandering around, we stick him back up on the wall. He’s kind of ubiquitous."

He didn't say whether anyone has ever uttered "Klaatu barada nikto" to Gort.

Read more about what other secret messages ISS astronauts left for one another over at Universe Today. (Image: NASA)