NASA has been preparing for the next asteroid that will potentially hit Earth for a few years now. The particular project they are developing right now is called the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or “ARM.” In the plan for this multi-step project, NASA is developing the first robotic mission ever, to visit an asteroid near earth, collect samples of boulders, and redirect the asteroid into a stable orbit around the moon. Eventually, they plan to have humans go out and do these missions, but predict that will only happen in the 2030s, or so.
NASA’s goal is to find an asteroid that could be redirected to the lunar orbit in the 2020s, but have yet to choose a candidate, and let me just add they are choosing a candidate out of over 1000 discovered near-Earth asteroids. The scientists also believe that more will be discovered in the coming years. The way they will choose their candidate is by studying the different asteroids’ velocities, orbits, sizes, and spins. The point of doing all this research is to try to accelerate NASA’s research on how to stop potentially dangerous asteroids in faster times. 
The ultimate goal of the ARM mission is to send a robotic spaceship into space by the end of the decade (so technically by next year), and once it locates the targeted asteroid, a robotic arm will extend and take a boulder sample. Once the sample is collected, the robotic spacecraft will redirect the asteroid into an orbit around the moon called “Distant Retrograde Orbit,” and once it is there, actual astronauts will go out in spaceships to study the asteroid. 
This research will open up a lot of doors in that astronauts will bring back more samples of asteroids than ever before, allowing much deeper research and many new scientific discoveries to be uncovered. This research will also lead to more planetary defense techniques and research for the human path to Mars.
This video is a brief, yet informational segment of how this research project is working out: Asteroid Redirect Mission: Robotic Segment

Comments

  1. Prof. Chris FragileSeptember 27, 2019 at 6:28 PM

    This is not a bad write up of the mission, and I appreciate you including the link to the video. Something is wrong with how you created your post because words were just randomly split across lines, which is annoying to read.

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