Obama Wants To Spend $100 Million To Lasso An Asteroid - Here's How It Could Actually Work

Illustration by Robert LeeThere's been an increased interest in asteroids ever since a meteor exploded in the sky above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February, an event almost immediately followed by the closest known flyby of a football-sized asteroid.

That's why NASA hopes to invest a significant chunk of federal money into a plan that involves "bagging" a small asteroid and dragging it back into orbit around the moon, later to be visited by astronauts who will bring back samples.

See the plan to lasso an asteroid >

In President Obama's 2014 budget proposal, unveiled on Wednesday, the space agency called for a spending total of $17.7 billion, with $105 million of that money dedicated to identifying potentially hazardous asteroids, NASA said in a news conference on Wednesday.

Of that, $78 million would go toward the asteroid retrieval initiative.

If successful, this would be the "first-ever mission to identify, capture, and relocate an asteroid," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.

Though wrought with unexpected challenges, the plan to wrangle a fast-rotating space rock actually seems pretty simple on paper.

NASA released an animation of the operation, which we've broken into slides.