Researchers believe they have the ability to retrieve 12 near-Earth asteroids with current rocket technology.
Retrieving the asteroids could not only remove potential threats, but could harvest valuable resources as well, MIT Technology Review reported.
A University of Strathclyde searched through thousands of near-Earth asteroids to find the accessible space rocks, now called Easily Retrievable Objects (EROs).
These objects can be "[maneuvered] into an accessible orbit by changing their velocity by less than 500 meters per second."
The team was able to locate 12 EROs out of the 9,000 near-Earth asteroids observed.
Even the smaller asteroids could contain enough metal to generate millions in Earth currency, a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center press release reported.
A company called Planetary Resources has already expressed a keen interest in asteroid mining, MIT Technology Review reported.
Some asteroids don't have a monetary value at this time, but are believed to contain water, which would be extremely beneficial should humans decide to venture far from their home planet, the NASA press release reported.
"Water is a critical life-support item for a spacefaring civilization, and it takes a lot of energy to launch it into space," Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, said. "With launch costs currently thousands of dollars per pound, you want to use water already available in space to reduce mission costs. The other thing you can do with water is break it apart into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, and that becomes rocket fuel, so you could have fuel depots out there where you're mining these asteroids."
A NASA mission scheduled for 2016 will study the asteroid Bennu for a number of reasons, and asteroid mining is one of them.
"The mission will develop important technologies for asteroid exploration that will benefit anyone interested in exploring or mining asteroids, whether it's NASA or a private company," Lauretta said.
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