NASA has big plans to land manned missions on asteroids in the next decade.
The space agency has been working with initial tests on Earth as it plans to send astronauts to asteroids in the near future, CNN reported.
Astronauts like Stan Love and Steve Bowen have been working to simulate asteroid landings. Last week, Love and Bowen climbed into a 40-foot-deep swimming pool at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston to practice clambering out of a mock spacecraft and onto a fake asteroid.
"We're working on the techniques and tools we might use someday to explore a small asteroid that was captured from an orbit around the sun and brought back by a robotic spacecraft to orbit around the moon," Love told CNN.
"When it's there, we can send people there to take samples and take a look at it up close," he said. "That's our main task; we're looking at tools we'd use for that, how we'd take those samples."
The two worked with tools like a pneumatic hammer to test how they would be used in space. They also helped engineers to test space suits that could be worn on the future mission.
While they're under water, astronauts have a lack of gravity similar to being in space, making the swimming pool a good place to practice.
NASA doesn't yet have a particular steroid in mind for the manned mission, but the agency's scientists are currently scoping out asteroids that could be captured to be put in orbit around the moon. Missions could then be sent to the asteroid for space research.
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