Before American astronauts go to Mars, they first have to grapple with an asteroid.

Literally.

NASA plans to launch a robotic mission in a few years to capture a small asteroid, haul it home and redirect it into a stable orbit around the moon. Then astronauts will fly up to study it, conducting spacewalks farther from Earth than ever before. Others can study it, too.

The idea is that finessing all these steps will help build and hone the technology needed to one day send astronauts to explore deep space and colonize Mars.

"The promise of this type of a mission in the big scheme of things in terms of opening up space for exploration and space resources this is like the Wright brothers' first flight, in some sense," said Dan Mazanek, senior space systems engineer at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton.

Mazanek and his team are working with other NASA centers to develop a full-scale, prototype robotic system that's one of two options NASA is considering for its Asteroid Retrieval Mission, or ARM, set to launch by the end of this decade.

On Friday morning, he showed off the system to local and state VIPs who, along with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, had just helped launch a new $52 million integrated engineering services building on the NASA Langley campus. The event also included center director Steve Jurczyk, NASA's deputy associate administrator Lesa Roe, Virginia congressmen Scott Rigell and Bobby Scott, and Hampton mayor George Wallace.

Mazanek's system, called Option B, will consist of a spacecraft fitted with two robotic "arms" with what's called microspine grippers "like thousands of fish hooks on the rock surface; hands with zillions of fingers." With gripping technology this advanced, he said, a robot could walk straight up a wall or even across a ceiling.

The spacecraft will also have three robotic limbs or legs for landing on a large asteroid and straddling a small boulder of between two and five meters. Once the arms pick up the boulder, the legs will "hop up" from the asteroid's microgravity environment and head back into space.

As the spacecraft begins its long, leisurely journey back to Earth under solar power, it can tuck the asteroid boulder safely inside its three closed limbs and use its arms for other things, like taking pictures of the asteroid.

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NASA Langley helps build robot to fetch an asteroid | With Video