NASA posted two press releases yesterday about the developments in the agency’s Asteroid Initiative. This includes a program to look for and track near earth asteroids . The current long term goal is to send an unmanned system to rendezvous with, capture, and move a small asteroid into an orbit in the Earth-Moon system where it would be visited by NASA astronauts:
- NASA Announces Latest Progress, Upcoming Milestones in Hunt for Asteroids – NASA
- NASA Selects Studies for the Asteroid Redirect Mission – NASA
Here is a video of discussion on June 19th by several NASA managers and scientists about the asteroid program :