Audrey Gavitt- Why is NASA chasing this asteroid?

Summary-

NASA is going to send The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft a space probe to to chase down the potentially dangerous, dark asteroid, Bennu. The space probe will spend 2 years trying to catch up with the asteroid. Bennu is on NASA's list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids so they are hard at work trying to learn more about it. The goal is to have probe orbit it and get a sample, scan it, take pictures and create and create a map then send it back to earth. With all of this information NASA hopefully can figure out if it will ever collide with earth when and how to possibly stop it.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/05/health/osiris-rex-nasa-asteroid-mission/index.html

Analysis-

This article was written by Amanda Barnett and published by CNN on September 5. It informs us on what NASA’s intentions are and why they are spending so much time and money chasing a rock. Since they retired shuttle missions in 2011 this will not be a man made exploration. This shows how far we have come in space travel, when the space race began in 1957 our main goal was to get man on the moon. Now NASA is trying to chase down an asteroid! Our technology has advanced so much in the past 50 years that we are able to potentially figure out the course of an asteroid from millions of miles away.