TOKYO — An Astroscale spacecraft continues to inspect a Japanese upper stage in low-Earth orbit, demonstrating that it can be done safely.
Astroscale announced on July 9 that its Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J) spacecraft performed a “fly around” maneuver, partially flying around the H-2A upper stage it had been inspecting for the past few months. ADRAS-J used sensors to maintain a distance of just 50 meters (164 feet) from the stage.
About a third of the way through the maneuver, however, ADRAS-J encountered what the company called an “unexpected attitude deviation,” which triggered an automatic abort. The spacecraft moved away from the stage, as intended, to avoid any risk of collision.
“The abort maneuver performed during the fly-around operation demonstrated that ADRAS-J can maintain safety even when conducting observations of close-approaching uncooperative objects,” the company said in a statement, adding that engineers had found the cause of the anomaly and were preparing for another close-approach landing site.
Aside from the anomaly, Astroscale says the ADRAS-J mission is going well. The spacecraft launched in February and reached the vicinity of the H-2A stage in April. It approached the stage to within 50 meters in May and has been conducting inspections since then, leading up to the fly-around maneuver that began June 19.
Nobu Okada, founder and CEO of Astroscale, showed some images of the stage taken by ADRAS-J during a presentation July 8 at the Spacetide conference here. “It was just beautiful,” he said.
The images showed the stage remained relatively pristine after 15 years in space. “These images have many implications” for future debris removal efforts, he said. One of them is a very low tumbling rate, which he called “almost static.”
In addition to a technical demonstration of rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), Okada said ADRAS-J was a policy demonstration that followed the guidelines for on-orbit service released by the Japanese government for safety and transparency. That included obtaining proper permissions, emphasizing safe operations and sharing information about spacecraft operations.
ADRAS-J is the first phase of a program by the Japanese space agency JAXA called Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration. In April, JAXA selected Astroscale for the second phase of the program, in which the company will send a spacecraft to the same upper stage to deorbit it. Astroscale has not yet released detailed plans for that mission.
While Astroscale was operating ADRAS-J, the company also conducted an initial public offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, a section of the exchange for companies with higher growth potential but also higher risk. Astroscale surged on its first day of trading on June 5, closing up more than 60%. The company has since given back those gains, closing at 818 yen ($5.07) per share on July 9, below its IPO price of 850 yen.
“This shows that the global investment community recognizes the importance of sustainability in space, but also the market opportunity for service in space,” he said of the IPO.
Okada emphasized the company’s growth, noting that its order backlog has grown from 1.7 billion yen two years ago to 28.5 billion yen today. “By leveraging RPO technologies, we are finally seizing opportunities,” he said. “We are on the cusp of a booming on-orbit service market.”