In support of NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission - a key part of the agency's stepping stone path to send humans to Mars - agency officials are seeking proposals for studies on advanced technology development.

Through a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), released Friday, NASA hopes to solicit proposals for concept studies in areas including asteroid capture systems, rendezvous sensors, adapting commercial spacecraft for the Asteroid Redirect Mission and feasibility studies of potential future partnership opportunities for secondary payloads and the crewed mission.

"As NASA continues to make great progress refining our mission concepts, we're reaching out to seek new and innovative ideas as we extend the frontier of space exploration," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "To reach Mars, we'll rely on new technologies and advanced capabilities proven through the Asteroid Initiative. We're looking forward to exciting ideas from outside NASA as well to help realize that vision."

Following evaluations of the proposals, NASA plans to select no more than 25 proposals and make total awards of as much as $6 million. Contracts would begin and end this year. More information can be found in the BAA, available here.

The announcement precedes a Wednesday, March 26, Asteroid Initiative Opportunities Forum at NASA Headquarters. The forum will provide status updates from ongoing Asteroid Redirect Mission concept and extensibility refinement and expand on the BAA, which is a follow-on step from the 2013 Request for Information in mission planning activities.

The event also will highlight opportunities for public engagement in the mission and activities associated with the agency's Asteroid Grand Challenge. The forum will be carried on NASA Television and streamed online for virtual participants. For the agenda and to register as a virtual participant, go here.

NASA's Asteroid Initiative includes the Asteroid Grand Challenge and the Asteroid Redirect Mission. The grand challenge will develop new partnerships and collaborations to accelerate the agency's existing planetary defense work, and the mission will collect and redirect an asteroid where astronauts can explore and sample it.

The Asteroid Redirect Mission has three major elements: target identification; a robotic mission to capture and redirect the selected asteroid into a stable orbit beyond the moon; and a crewed segment in which astronauts in NASA's Orion spacecraft launched on the Space Launch System rocket will rendezvous with the captured asteroid, conduct spacewalks to collect samples from it, and return them to the Earth for analysis. New capabilities and systems tested through the Asteroid Initiative will advance NASA's ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars.