Japan’s mission makes progress in orbital clean-up [Video]

Astroscale’s ADRAS-J (Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan) mission achieved a successful rendezvous with a second-stage H-2A rocket, nearing to within several hundred kilometers of the drifting object. The spacecraft is now preparing to conduct a detailed examination of the aging rocket, orbiting around it and capturing images.

The rocket’s upper stage, launched in 2009, lacks its own GPS data, making precise location determination for a rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) mission challenging, Astroscale Japan said in a press release.

Utilizing ground-based operations

Leveraging limited ground-based observations, Astroscale’s operations teams in Japan and the UK maneuvered ADRAS-J within a few hundred kilometers of the rocket’s upper stage successfully. 

Subsequently, ADRAS-J’s visual camera identified the rocket, and its images were processed using Astroscale’s Angles-Only Navigation algorithms.

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