NASA announces asteroid sample return mission

NASA will launch a sample-return mission to an asteroid in 2016, agency officials announced today (May 25). 

The $800 million OSIRIS-Rex will be the United States' first asteroid sample-return effort and only the second mission in history to retrieve samples from an asteroid. Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft successfully returned pieces of the asteroid Itokawa to Earth in June 2010.

 

 The mission will take seven years.  This seems like an optimistic mission.  The way things are going, there may not be any NASA when the ship gets back.