Asteroids: exploration, defense or both?

Senior Writer at Space.com, Clara Moskowitz, updates readers on progress with the European Space Agency Rosetta mission analysis and the recent encounter with the 100 kilometers (62 miles) wide, Lutetia asteroid, while the spacecraft remains en route to the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet in 2014.

NASA scientists are today gathered in Washington to begin a more careful look at how best human beings may reach one, while some commercial space interests ponder mining one, or even, NASA defend the Earth against one of the --- incoming!

Here are some of the NASA concepts.

Near-Earth objects (NEO's) have been of recent growing interest to both the American and Russian space agencies. President Barrack Obama directed NASA space policy planners to begin human asteroid landing destination studies earlier this year to about 200 space leaders at the Kennedy Space Center. More from UPI and the BBC.