How could you capture an asteroid?

                                                                                                                                                                                Ah asteroids, those dinosaur-killing, Scrooge-McDuck-moneybins from heaven.                                  They're great and all, but you know what would be better? All the asteroids gathered up and put in a nice safe orbit where we harvest out all their precious sweet, juicy platinum cores.

Instead of nervously scanning the heavens, wishing we had more iridium at our disposal, we could seek out all the asteroids in the Solar System and push them somewhere we can get at them, whenever we want after we dump them into the orbital equivalent of a lazy susan.

Okay fine, instead of pushing all the asteroids around, maybe we should start with one. Get that right and we can extend our plans to the rest of the delicious space rocks we crave.

I know this sounds like just another pie in the sky "Fraser-Cain-double-plus-crazy" plan, but I'm not the only one to propose this idea. In fact, NASA has expressed plans to reach out and capture an asteroid and maybe put it into orbit around Earth.

There are many benefits to this plan. We'll learn just how hard it is to move asteroids around, should we find one on a dangerous trajectory. We'll learn how to land on an asteroid, and extract its precious resources. And of course, there's the science. So much to learn from a pet asteroid. Also, if anyone ticks us off we can lop off clumps and hurl it at them. So a dinosaur killing space rock, returned safely to Earth? That sounds a little dangerous. Possibly a species-wide Darwin awards moment.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-capture-asteroid.html#jCp