NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has a crazy sounding new mission that is actually pretty sensible once you hear about its purpose. 

They want to create a robot that will visit a near earth asteroid, retrieve a multi-ton boulder from the surface, then bring the boulder to the moon and place it in orbit. 

Why in the world would we want to do that? In one word, Mars. 

Once the boulder is in orbit around the moon we will be able to send missions to it in order to study it and work out ways to use this to our advantage for future missions to Mars. 

This Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will allow us to create new technologies and give us new spaceflight experiences that are currently beyond our reach. 

Check out the video below to learn more about this fascinating new mission and remember to let us know your thoughts in the comments below!