The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) hopes to latch onto an asteroid it will later use as a stepping stone to send astronauts to Mars.

The space agency is actively pursuing a fantastic mission called the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) that aims to identify, capture, and redirect an asteroid into lunar orbit.

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ARM's goal is to take astronauts to Mars. It will advance technologies and spaceflight experience needed for humans to colonize the Red Planet.

A professor of planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Richard Binzel, opposes NASA's mission. He calls the effort to capture far-off asteroids wasteful and unnecessary.

Instead, he claims there are a number of near Earth asteroids in native orbits close to the Moon astronauts can visit.

In a recent interview with MIT News, Binzel spoke of how NASA needed a more pragmatic approach to getting to the moon.

The near Earth asteroids, roughly 10 million of them as large as 10 meters in diameter, serve as natural milestones in humanity's journey to leave the Earth-Moon orbit and become true interstellar travelers.

He states there is really no other way these asteroids can be of any help in reaching Mars.

The National Research Council calls NASA's ARM "dead-end elements." Instead, they say getting to Mars is more about expanding the distance and duration of human space flight.

They believe ARM could help with the mission to Mars if it utilizes its solar-electric propulsion to eventually send supplies to Mars.

This will effectively extend the mission time of astronauts, which is very valuable in space exploration. 

TagsNASA, Arm, Asteroid Redirect Mission, Mars, Richard Binzel