Illustration by Robert Lee
There'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.
