A spacecraft has carefully approached and imaged a large hunk of metal orbiting Earth — a step in tackling humanity's mounting space junk woes.

Spacecraft approaches metal object zooming around Earth, snaps footage

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-28 18:30:03

A spacecraft has carefully approached and imaged a large hunk of metal orbiting Earth — a step in tackling humanity's mounting space junk woes.

The delicate space mission, undertaken by the Japanese satellite technology company Astroscale, used its ADRAS-J satellite to travel within several hundred meters of an abandoned section of a noncommunicative, derelict rocket, proving it could safely observe in such close proximity.

"Pics or it didn't happen," the company posted on X (formerly Twitter). "Behold, the world’s first image of space debris captured through rendezvous and proximity operations during our ADRAS-J mission."

The mission is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA, which is Japan's NASA counterpart) "Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration" project, which seeks a proven way to remove problematic space junk from Earth's orbit. A collision involving a large object can create thousands more pieces of debris, stoking a domino effect of future impacts.

The experimental spacecraft will now continue to closely approach the rocket, which Japan launched in 2009, gathering more data on the rocket's condition and motion. The following mission, with this information in hand, will "then remove and deorbit the rocket body using in-house robotic arm technologies," the company said in a statement.