NASA wants to capture an asteroid within the next five years

NASA says it has tentative plans in place to launch an Asteroid Redirect Mission robotic spacecraft as early as 2019—that’s, uh, only five years from now. A specific asteroid will be chosen about a year before, with two concepts in mind: one, to capture a very small asteroid in open space and two, to collect a -boulder-sized sample. Once an asteroid is captured, it’ll be placed into the moon’s orbit, giving NASA the opportunity to do its thing. Eventually, NASA is hoping to send astronauts to the asteroid to study sometime in the 2020s, though no definitive timeframe has been set; scientists have to first capture the actual asteroid before they even begin to think about sending humans to set foot on it.