NASA's asteroid-harvesting mission solicits proposals for its robotic spacecraft

Asteroid mining is coming soon to a planet near you: this planet, and in 2021, to be specific. But NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission has lots of work to do before that point. Today the space-faring organization issued an official "request for proposal" from four partners on how they would go about creating the robotic spacecraft that would perform the actual asteroid redirection in question. This mission is a bit different from OSIRIS-REx, which recently got underway. The idea there is to go to an asteroid, grab a piece and return it to Earth -- difficult enough, but it wouldn't be the first collection of "live" asteroid matter -- that was already achieved by the Japanese probe Hayabusa a few years ago (an astonishing achievement, by the way).