TOKYO -- In a rented office near Tokyo Tower, engineers toil away in a clean room, developing what look like small remote-controlled buggies. In a couple of years, the contraptions could wind up more than 350,000 km away, on the moon.
The engineers' mission is to build a rover that could be deployed in NASA's manned lunar program, Artemis. To achieve that goal, they are building on Japan's unique strength in remote-controlled robotics -- a strength that helped the country achieve the world's first sample-return missions to asteroids and aided investigations inside the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant.
