NASA Administrator Visits JPL, Talks Asteroids

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden met with members of the asteroid initiative team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., today.

Later, Bolden and some team members spoke with media inside a JPL lab where advanced technology propulsion systems are built and tested, like the type that will be used for the asteroid initiative. JPL and NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland are developing the ion thruster jointly.

The initiative is a proposal to robotically capture a small near-Earth asteroid and redirect it safely to a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system, where astronauts can visit in person and explore it.