A NASA spacecraft may one day sling itself from one comet or asteroid to another using a harpoon and a superlong tether.
That's the idea behind Comet Hitchhiker, a proposal that received funding this year from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which seeks to encourage the development of transformative exploration technologies.
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.
