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A team of astronauts, however, have already started preparing for just such a
mission. Among them is Major
Tim Peake, a former British Army helicopter test pilot who is now the
first official British astronaut with the European Space Agency.

Next month they will begin a training programme that will teach them how to
operate vehicles, conduct spacewalks and gather samples on the surface of an
asteroid.

While the primary goal of a mission to an asteroid will be scientific to learn
more about their hostile environments, the skills needed to work on their
surface could also prove invaluable should scientists discover one on a
collision course with Earth.

Nasa is currently monitoring more than 400 objects with potential to hit the
Earth, although most are considered to be low risk.

Major Peake said: “With the technology we have available and are
developing today, an asteroid mission of up to a year is definitely
achievable.

“Asteroids are interesting on a number of different levels. Nasa is
focused on the science you can achieve as asteroids are essentially a
historical record of billions of years of our universe where we can take
samples from.

“These objects are also coming extremely close to Earth all the time, but
we rarely hear about it. In the last year we had an asteroid come within
Earth’s geostationary orbit, which is closer than some satellites.

“With enough warning we would probably send a robotic mission to deflect
an asteroid, but if something is spotted late and is big enough we might
come into Armageddon type scenarios where we may have to look at manned
missions to deflect it.

“That is when the skills we are learning about how to work on an asteroid
could be useful.”

Officials at Nasa are due to reveal details of a manned mission to an asteroid
at a conference later this month in Japan.

In a report to be presented to the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting, they will
say that it hopes to launch an unmanned spacecraft that will use a robotic
arm to collect samples from an asteroid by 2016 before sending a manned
mission by the late 2020s.

A manned mission will aim to rendezvous with an asteroid up to three million
miles from the Earth, taking around a year to make the entire round trip.
The astronauts could stay on the asteroid for up to 30 days.

The officials will say that such missions to asteroids could help test
technology for future human missions to other planets including Mars.

Nasa hopes that such missions will provide new scientific information about
the early universe while also providing valuable information for ways of
defending Earth from collisions with asteroids.

Earlier this year scientists identified an asteroid more than 460 feet wide
that could come close enough to Earth to collide with our planet in 2040.

New findings by Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft released last week have also revealed
that around six per cent of the meteorites to have hit the Earth broke off a
large 120 mile wide asteroid called Vesta, which was found to be rich in
metals and minerals including iron and magnesium.

In the Hollywood movie Armageddon, a crew of astronauts and oil rig drillers
are sent into space to land on a massive asteroid that is on a collision
course with the Earth, where they drill beneath the surface to plant nuclear
warheads in the hope of destroying it.

Major Peake and five other astronauts will next month be sent to an underwater
base off the coast of Florida where they will spend 12 days living 65 feet
beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean to simulate working in the
difficult low gravity environment of an asteroid.

During the underwater training they will also test equipment that is being
developed for such a mission.

Although the training does not guarantee Major Peake a place on a future
mission to an asteroid, it means he could be on a shortlist of potential
candidates if one is launched within the timescales being proposed by Nasa.

The astronauts have already received extensive briefings about working on
asteroids and have begun training on land to prepare for the mission beneath
the sea.

They will share a 43 feet long by 20 feet wide underwater capsule where they
will live, eat and sleep as part of the Nasa Extreme Environment Mission
Operation, or NEEMO.

Major Peake said: “Asteroids present some really interesting challenges
as even a big asteroid is going to be a low gravity environment, so we have
to look at how we would anchor a vehicle and ourselves to that surface.

“We are looking at all sorts of different tools and techniques for how
you would explore an asteroid, collect scientific samples and return them to
Earth.

“NEEMO is as close to the real thing as we can manage on Earth. We are in
a confined space and living quarters are very tight.

“We will need at least 12 hours of decompression before we can resurface
safely so we are sort of trapped down there, and that makes it much more
realistic.”

While underwater, they will conduct a hectic schedule of exercises where they
will move around the ocean floor in vehicles much like they would above the
surface of an asteroid.

They will also perform “spacewalks” on the sea floor and test
equipment for tethering a spacecraft to an asteroid, collecting rock samples
and drilling into the rock.

Major Peake added: “I would love to go on an asteroid mission. There is a
possibility that if things continue at a good pace an asteroid mission could
happen within the 2020s and that is within the operational time frame of
myself and the other ESA astronauts.”