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alokmohan
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Experts have been wary of asteroids since they came to the conclusion that one of them ended the Age of the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Scientists such as Stephen Hawking warn that their relatively close proximity presents grave dangers to humankind, a point of view supported in a number of recent books, such as William Burrows' The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Save Earth and British astronomer royal Martin Rees' Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning. <br /><br /><br />But others consider asteroids the next landscape for scientific discovery. "We're looking at the possibilities," says Kelly Humphries, a spokesman for NASA's Johnson Space Center. With NASA planning a moon-exploring spacecraft, Humphries says, "Anything robust enough to go to the moon is going to be robust enough for lots of missions."<br /><br /><br />In December, NASA astronaut Edward Lu told Space.com that plans under study include landing on an asteroid and retrieving rock samples for return to Earth before 2020. <br /><br /><br />And at NASA's Ames Research Center, lab chief Simon "Pete" Worden, a longtime advocate of such exploration, has set aside $10 million for designing small spacecraft that could visit asteroids, according to the Jan. 19 Science magazine. <br /><br /><br />The space agency does have a few asteroid missions already planned. In its just-released 2008 budget, NASA said it is studying a mission, dubbed the Origins Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security (OSIRIS) probe, to return rock samples from an asteroid.<br /><br /><br />In June, NASA will launch the Dawn mission to orbit the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.<br /><br /><br />And outside NASA, others also see asteroids' scientific potential.<br /><br /><br />"They are pristine in a way, vagabonds <br />