As the human population continues to explode, the search for how to satisfy our ever-growing hunger is becoming paramount, and scientists at NASA have started to look skyward for the oasis. In 2016 NASA plans to launch the first asteroid-mining mission to both gain more resources for Earth and explore new frontiers in deep space exploration.

“The mission will be a proof-of-concept—can you go to an asteroid, get material and bring it back to Earth,” says Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson and principal investigator for NASA’s asteroid-sample-return mission. The 2016 mission is called OSIRIS-REx, and the target is Bennu, an asteroid that was discovered in 1999. The OSIRIS-REx mission will send a spacecraft to Bennu. Once it arrives at the asteroid in 2018, the spacecraft will look for organic materials and minerals, measure the asteroid’s temperature and map where elements may exist on its surface.

Made from the “leftovers” of our solar system’s creation 4.5 billion years ago, asteroids number in the hundreds of thousands circling around the sun, most of which are between Mars and Jupiter. They are made up of metals, rocks, dust and ice and range in size from a few meters to a few hundred kilometers across. Though most are smaller in size, even a house-sized asteroid can contain millions of dollars worth of metals.

Astronomers have classified asteroids into three types. The other two types are less common. The S-type has no water and is mostly metallic, containing materials such as iron, nickel and cobalt, but also possibly precious minerals. The M-type is the most rare, but contains 10 times the amount of metal as the S-types.

The most common C-type has a lot of water. Though there’s plenty of water on Earth, the water on these asteroids would be vital for human expansion across the solar system. “Water is a critical life-support item for a spacefaring civilization, and it takes a lot of energy to launch it into space,” says Lauretta. “You want to use water already available in space to reduce mission costs. The other thing you can do with water is break it apart into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, and that becomes rocket fuel, so you could have fuel depots out there where you’re mining these asteroids.”

NASA hopes information gathered on Bennu will also help researchers better understand asteroids’ composition and the way they move throughout the solar system. Scientists believe this mission will also be the first step in learning more about asteroids and their viability for future commercial mining missions.