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.
The first thing NASA has to do is identify a suitable asteroid target. The ideal space rock is one that's small (about 25 feet wide) and close to Earth.
The size of the space rock is important. If something were to go wrong, this asteroid will be small enough to burn up before it enters Earth's atmosphere.
Next, a robotic spaceship will be launched and used to capture the asteroid.
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