Sadly, the Asteroid Redirect Mission was cancelled in June of this year. Pity, it sounded cool. The military applications alone would be awesome.
http://spacenews.com/nasa-closing-out-asteroid-redirect-mission/
NASA closing out Asteroid Redirect Mission
by Jeff Foust — June 14, 2017
GREENBELT, Md. — With administration plans to cancel it announced earlier this year, and a lack of congressional support, NASA is in an “orderly closeout” phase of its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) while keeping alive some of its key technologies for other applications.
In a presentation at a June 13 meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) here, Michele Gates, program director for ARM at NASA Headquarters, said the mission received its “notice of defunding” from agency leadership in April, weeks after a budget blueprint document for fiscal year 2018 released by the White House called for cancelling the mission.
“We are in an orderly closeout phase, capturing all the good work that has been done across the team, and transitioning activities as appropriate to other potential missions or archived for future use,” she said.
ARM called for sending a robotic spacecraft to a near Earth asteroid, where it would grab a boulder a few meters across from the asteroid’s surface and return it to cislunar space. Astronauts flying on an Orion spacecraft would then visit the boulder, performing studies and collecting samples for return to Earth.
The mission, though, struggled to win support since its introduction in 2013, particularly in Congress, where members were skeptical that the mission was on the critical path for NASA’s long-term goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s. At recent hearings on NASA’s 2018 budget request, members showed no interest in reversing plans in the proposal to cancel the mission.
“It’s good to see that the NASA budget request ends the previous administration’s ill-conceived asteroid mission,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science Committee, during a June 8 hearing by his committee’s space subcommittee on the NASA budget request. “Instead, other, and more needed, technologies will be developed under different programs.”