Ibadan, 27 August 2024. – Astroscale Japan Inc. a subsidiary of Astroscale Holdings Inc. (“Astroscale”) has signed a contract with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for Phase II of JAXA’s Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration (CRD2) program, one of the world’s first technology demonstrations of removing large-scale debris from orbit.
The contract, with a value of approximately 13 billion yen (including tax), aims to remove an unprepared Japanese upper-stage rocket body from orbit, thereby addressing the increasingly critical issue of space debris. Unprepared objects in orbit pose an additional challenge as they have yet to undergo preparation with any technologies that enable docking or potential servicing or removal.
The program is in two phases, and Astroscale Japan won the contract for Phase I, where the company was responsible for the design, manufacture, test, launch and operations of Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J). In addition, ADRAS-J is the world’s first mission to safely approach, characterize and survey the state of an existing piece of large debris through rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO). After demonstrating a safe approach and proximity operations with the object (the size of a city bus), ADRAS-J has subsequently been gathering images and data to assess its movement and structural condition.
The ADRAS-J follow-on active debris removal spacecraft, ADRAS-J2, will similarly attempt to safely approach the same rocket body through RPO, obtain further images, and then remove and deorbit the rocket body using in-house robotic arm technologies. Furthermore, the ADRAS-J mission recently achieved a technical milestone for a commercial company: the controlled fly-around observations of the upper stage while maintaining a controlled fixed-point relative position of approximately 50 meters from the upper stage.
