TOKYO — An Astroscale spacecraft is continuing to inspect a Japanese upper stage left in low Earth orbit while demonstrating it can do so safely. Astroscale announced July 9 that its Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J) spacecraft conducted a “fly around” maneuver, going part way around the H-2A upper stage it has been inspecting for the last few months. ADRAS-J used sensors to maintain a distance of just 50 meters from the stage.
However, about one third of the way through the maneuver, ADRAS-J encountered what the company called an “unexpected attitude anomaly” that triggered an automatic abort. The spacecraft moved away from the stage as designed to avoid any risk of a collision. “The abort maneuver implemented during the fly-around operation demonstrated that ADRAS-J can maintain safety even while performing close approach observations of non-cooperative objects,” the company said in a statement, adding that engineers had found the cause of the anomaly and were preparing for another close approach to the stage.
Other than the anomaly, Astroscale says the ADRAS-J mission has been going well. The spacecraft launched in February and reached the vicinity of the H-2A stage in April. It approached to within 50 meters of the stage in May and has been conducting inspections of it since then, leading up to the fly-around maneuver that started June 19.
Nobu Okada, founder and chief executive of Astroscale, showed some of the images of the stage taken by.
