Japan comes face to face with its own space junk
A satellite operated by Japanese company Astroscale has chased down a 15 year-old piece of space junk and taken an up-close image of it.
The object is a discarded rocket segment that’s about 11m by 4m (36ft by 15ft), with a mass of three tonnes.
It’s the first time anyone has managed to rendezvous with so big a piece of space debris.
Astroscale is developing a business that would offer to remove others’ redundant hardware from orbit.
It won’t do it on this occasion; the current mission is all about testing the sensors and software needed for safe proximity operations. But a determined effort to pull a lump of junk out of the sky should occur in the next couple of years, the firm says.
The issue of orbital debris and the sustainable use of space is becoming a hot topic right now.
Millions of items of techno-detritus have accumulated overhead since the start of the space age in 1957 – from flecks of paint to the abandoned upper-stages of rockets, like the one just pictured by Astroscale.
