...The purpose of the mission is to take a sample from the asteroid and return it to Earth.
Anyone besides me think that sounds like a potentially bad idea?
It's not the first time it's been done. Nothing bad has happened so far.
If they can sample things on Mars, and report remotely on the results, why not with the asteroid?
An asteroid (or comet) has almost no gravity, so it's much easier to return a sample to earth from those objects, than from Mars.
The Russians tried a few years ago to do a sample return from Mars' moon Phobos, but that mission failed.
The US has done a sample return from a comet's tail, the Japanese did a previous asteroid return with Hayabusa 1, and the US has a current asteroid mission underway to return a sample from a "carbon rich" asteroid named Bennu (Will they find diamonds?).
And then, of course, there's all those moon rocks the Apollo astronauts brought from the Moon.