NASA Project, Led by Arizona Professor, Will Send a Robot to an Asteroid and Back

A spacecraft with a robotic arm will pluck a rock sample from an asteroid and shoot it back to Earth for analysis, assuming all goes well with a new mission announced today by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The spacecraft mission, to be led by Michael J. Drake, a professor of cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona, is expected to take flight in 2016. The scientists hope the rock will serve as a kind of time capsule, since the asteroid should contain material left over when the sun formed.