This asteroid mission brings together the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration efforts to achieve the President's goals faster and at a lower cost to taxpayers than continuing with business as usual. (NASA/Advanced Concepts Laboratory)

NASA's new plan to lasso an asteroid and bring it into orbit around the moon sounds like it came straight out of science fiction, but it actually emerged from an idea by an Italian student and a Caltech study by the Keck Institute, which looks into outside-the-box concepts.

The proposed $78 million asteroid initiative is included in NASA's 2014 budget plan, unveiled by President Barack Obama on Wednesday, and would meet the president's previous goal to send humans to an asteroid by 2025.

The ambitious plan involves sending a robotic spacecraft to intercept a nearby asteroid, halting its spin, towing it back into lunar orbit, then sending a manned mission to rendezvous with the asteroid and mine it for scientific purposes.

The technology needed to do it is just now emerging, the Keck study's authors determined. Initially, the researchers thought about capturing a very small asteroid and bringing it to the International Space Station. That was part of a 2011 study, but the scientists went back to the drawing board the next year to consider capturing an asteroid with a mass of about 500,000 kilograms.

Louis Friedman, a co-founder of the Pasadena-based Planetary Society who participated in the study, credited Marco Tantardi for coming up with the idea and pursuing it doggedly.

"I was introduced to the idea by a young intern," Friedman said last week in an Orlando Sentinel article. "First of

Similar plans have also emerged in recent years, including a 2011 conceptual plan by Chinese astronomers at Tsinghua University to bring an asteroid into Earth's orbit.

The idea has taken some criticism, however, particularly because it's not part of the "Decadal Survey," the outline of future space exploration that represents a consensus view of the scientific community.

Its inclusion in NASA's budget also reflects the agency's shrinking budget and inability to fund the missions that have priority in the scientific community, such as sending humans to Mars.

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NASA plan to capture asteroid rooted in Caltech study