Cleaning up cosmic litter
On March 22, Astroscale launched its End-of-Life Services by Astroscale (ELSA-d) demonstration craft on a Soyuz rocket that took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
It is the first commercial mission "to prove the core technologies necessary for space debris," Okada said.
How does the clean up work?
ELSA-d is made of two satellites that have been stacked atop each other, a 175-kilogram (385-pound) servicer satellite and a client satellite that weighs 17 kilograms.
The servicer vehicle is equipped with proximity rendezvous technologies and a magnetic docking mechanism and is designed to remove defunct satellites and other large pieces of debris from orbit.