NASA is planning a mission that could help prevent an "Armageddon"-style event with an asteroid hitting Earth.

  • NASA plans mission to asteroid coming toward Earth
  • Mission would send robotic spacecraft to deflect an asteroid
  • Project also would help advance manned Mars mission
  • RELATED: Upcoming Space Coast launch schedule

NASA and the White House announced plans Wednesday for the space agency's first "Asteroid Redirect Mission."

"This is a hazard, 65 million years ago, that the dinosaurs succumbed to. We have to be smarter than the dinosaurs," said John Holdren, the White House's science adviser.

In February 2013, a bright light came from the sky over Siberia in Russia — a meteor, a small asteroid entering Earth's atmosphere.

When this "small," 10-ton object impacted the ground at more than 30,000 mph, it hit with a power 30 times greater than an atomic bomb, shattering windows and injuring some 1,000 people in the area.

"We are going to get better, through this Asteroid Redirect Mission, at identifying dangerous asteroids, learning how to deflect them," Holdren said.

In the next decade, the space agency plans to launch a robotic mission to one of about 1,000 near-Earth asteroids.

The goal is for a solar electric probe to capture a large boulder off the surface of the asteroid, using a robotic arm.

"We will then use the gravitational mass of that multi-ton boulder and the spacecraft to alter the trajectory of the parent asteroid," NASA ARM Program Director Dr. Michele Gates said.

Then the spacecraft will redirect the boulder to a stable orbit around the Moon. Astronauts will then rendezvous with the robotic spacecraft inside an Orion crew capsule to take soil samples, then bring them back to Earth for study.

The astronauts will take off on a new heavy-lift rocket for the 25-day mission, which is expected to take place sometime in the 2020s. Right now, NASA is looking for the right asteroid to conduct the mission.

It's too early to say whether these missions will launch from the Space Coast.

The mission has another component: It helps in NASA's progression to a manned Mars mission, sometime in the 2030s.

"The ARM mission exploits, and will exploit, a whole variety of technologies that come together to advance our progress toward the moon," Holdren said. "One is human operations in stable orbit around the moon. Another is the combination of robotic capabilities that will pull a boulder from an asteroid and bring it into that orbit, and the human capabilities, the judgment, the on-the-spot decision-making that only humans can deliver."

Just last week, NASA launched a mission to an asteroid. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will find an asteroid and mine it for samples.