Two teams of University of Alabama mechanical engineering students spent their senior year designing prototypes for tools that NASA anticipates it will need for planned missions in the 2020s and beyond. The UA teams are participating with 22 schools nationwide in NASA’s Microgravity Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Team (Micro-g NExT) competition. These tool prototypes will be used to help collect samples from asteroids and move them closer to the moon’s orbit to be studied. The technology concepts developed by the university teams could someday be used to mine resources on asteroids as well as Mars, according to NASA.