The agency already has plenty of practice with wrangling asteroid samples. In June 2010, the original Hayabusa spacecraft delivered flecks of asteroid 25143 Itokawa safely back to the Earth, capping off of seven-year journey. Hayabusa remains the first and only successful asteroid sample return mission (NASA's Stardust mission achieved similar results, but with a comet, Wild-2).

The samples returned in 2010, consisting of 1534 dust particles, revealed that Itokawa was ripped apart at one point, which yielded insights about how to break up an asteroid that might be on a collision course with Earth. It also represented the first steps towards asteroid-mining, which is already being bandied about as a major industry of the future.

The Itokawa samples also provided a unique window into the early solar system, which is one of the major reasons that asteroid sample return missions are such a powerful scientific tool. Information about planetary development, the distribution of water, and even the origin of life may be locked deep with asteroids. To get at it, we can't just wait for good samples to fall to Earth; we have to actively go out and look for them.