There's a scene in the film Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey's character flies his spaceplane up to meet a mothership spinning out of control. The protagonist rises to the challenge with a polished piece of piloting and successfully links up with his objective.

Real life, of course, isn't quite this dramatic. Slow down that spin to a tranquil tumble, and replace McConaughey's hand on the joystick with the autonomous wits of a computer, and you'll arrive at an approximation of what Japanese company Astroscale has accomplished within the last year.

Still, it's an impressive feat of engineering and orbital dynamics. Astroscale's ADRAS-J mission became the first spacecraft (at least in the unclassified world) to approach a piece of space junk in low-Earth orbit. This particular object, a derelict upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket, has been in orbit since 2009. It's one of about 2,000 spent rocket bodies circling the Earth and one of more than 45,000 objects in orbit tracked by US Space Command.

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