Working behind a plastic shroud that keeps dust out, NASA engineer Art Thompson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, works with an early mock-up of what is called Nanorover, a lunchbox-sized space vehicle that will touch down on and explore a one-kilometer-wide asteroid. The small near-Earth asteroid 4660 Nereus is the target of a Japanese space mission that will launch in 2002. When its payload is full, it will return to the Japanese spaceship, which will in turn come back to Earth in 2006. From the book Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species, page 127.