A lightweight version of the International Space Station's robotic arm will help space sustainability company Astroscale remove decades-old space junk from Earth's orbit in the first mission of its kind.
Astroscale, which has offices in Japan and the U.K., previously ran a demonstration of active space debris removal technology with its ELSA-d mission, which in 2021 successfully captured a piece of simulated debris using a magnetic system. That technology requires the target satellite to be equipped with a magnetic docking plate from the get go and so could only be used on satellites developed with debris removal in mind, like those launched by internet megaconstellation operator OneWeb, which is Astroscale's partner in the follow-up mission ELSA-M.
