Picking an option for the robotic portion of its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) allows NASA to proceed with development, but does not appear to have won over those skeptical of the mission’s overall utility.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
