US President-Elect Shows Consistency With Mars Plan

NASA is developing the capacity to send astronauts deep into space to obtain samples from Mars and other space bodies, but has identified 25 "gaps" in their knowledge of how to keep Earth organisms safe from alien contamination, and how to keep humans from contaminating space.

One of the missions NASA hopes to undertake in the future includes the Asteroid Redirect Mission, where astronauts will be sent to lunar orbit in the 2020's to collect pieces of a captured asteroid and bring them to Earth.

Scientists hope the samples can help give insight into how life on Earth evolved and how the solar system was formed.