NASA plans to capture an Asteroid, Setting It to Orbit the Moon

The project was first suggested by the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California a year ago, and then adopted by NASA and The White House's Office of Science and Technology. Yesterday, Barack Obama destined 78 million dollars of the 2014 budget to this mission. In a first stage, an asteroid capture capsule would be built, attached to an old Atlas V rocket and sent to space. Then, electric thrusters and of solar energy would be used in order to stop the asteroid in its tracks and tow it into a gravitationally neutral spot between the Earth and the Moon. According to calculations of the Keck Institute, to tow an asteroid of seven meters and 500.000 kg would cost around 2.600 million dollars. The first 78 million assigned yesterday to the project would go towards finding the right asteroid to lasso. This is not an easy task because the asteroids that usually pass near the Earth are bigger and it is difficult to find a smaller one with the current detection technologies. Also, the asteroid picked must pass near the Earth again by 2020, which is the year that it is anticipated the mission will be ready. One of the purposes of this mission is to study more deeply asteroids. Eventually, astronauts would visit the retrieved asteroid using rockets and capsules NASA is already developing, fulfilling the Obamas goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-effective manner and allowing the recovery and return to Earth samples of the asteroids rocks. Asteroids are rich in metals of the platinum group, which are a scarce resource in Earth. Therefore the mission could open a window for private companies to exploit the resources of asteroids in the future. The crew could also conduct a research on how to deflect threats that target Earth. Finally, the asteroid could be used as a way station for NASA missions to Mars in a future. What are the possible risks of this mission? It doesnt represent a threat to Earth, because the asteroid picked would be of type C, which has the same density as a dry mud ball; and it would be brought to Earth in a much slower speed than the one that had the asteroid that exploited in Russia weeks ago.