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Private space-junk probe snaps historic photo of discarded rocket in orbit
"Behold, the world's first image of space debris captured through rendezvous and proximity operations during our ADRAS-J mission."
The ADRAS-J satellite, operated by the Japanese company Astroscale, successfully maneuvered to within a few hundred meters of a discarded rocket body this month, snapping a striking photo to memorialize the achievement. The 330-pound (150 kilograms) probe's main task is to rendezvous with, and study, a big hunk of space junk — the upper stage of the Japanese H-2A rocket that launched the GOSAT Earth-observation satellite in 2009. Rocket bodies like the H-2A upper stage are like giant bullets whizzing around Earth; if they slam into another hunk of junk or an active satellite, the smashup could spawn a debris cloud that could lead to a catastrophic collision cascade.
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