Distance of Astroscale ADRAS-J from the H2A stage, based on TLEs. Note the error on the TLEs is at least 1 km so most of the details here are likely spurious, but we can conclude they stay within 1 km for past 8 days

📢 NEWS: Pics or it didn't happen. Behold, the world’s first image of space debris captured through rendezvous and proximity operations during our ADRAS-J mission. #ShowtheWayADRASJ

astroscale.com/astroscale-unv…

The Chang'e-5 orbiter was testing out lunar DRO (distant retrograde orbit) when I last heard of it in Mar 2023. Anyone know its current (or at least more recent) status? Andrew Jones ? Scott Tilley 🇺🇦 ?

A planned ISS orbit correction was performed tonight at 02:35 UTC to maintain the station’s orbit altitude, using the #ProgressMS26 engines. The orbit altitude was increased for 1 km.

Seven cubesats were deployed from ISS on Apr 18
but only five have been cataloged to date. Possibly the sats are still too close together to be reliably tracked?

On the ISS, astronauts Kononenko and Chub carried out spacewalk VKD-62 on Apr 25, installing the Kvartz-M and TKK-KM experiments on the exterior of Poisk and deploying an antenna panel on the Nabor-miniRSA radar. The Poisk airlock was depressurized for 4h 55m.

LAUNCH at 1259 UTC Apr 25 of the Shenzhou 18 spaceship carrying Ye Guangfu, Li Guangsu and Li Cong. Shenzhou 18 docked with the nadir port on the Tianhe module at 1932 UTC.

At the end of its third 11-day-period highly elliptical Earth orbit, the upper stage from the Queqiao-2 launch is thought to have reentered over the S Atlantic at around 0700 UTC Apr 24.

Jonathan's Space Report No. 832 now published at planet4589.org/jsr.html

LAUNCH at 2232 UTC Apr 23 of Electron flight 47 from Mahia pad 1B, New Zealand with Korea KAIST's NeonSat-1 imaging satellite and NASA-Ames' ACS3 solar sail tech test

LAUNCH at 2217 UTC Apr 23 of Starlink Group 6-53 from Canaveral pad 40

I wrote a short paper about how this object might have formed, and what it implies for future discoveries: arxiv.org/abs/2404.13047 1/n

I have now posted orbital history plots for all the objects tracked as released from the Salyut-4,5,6,7 and Mir space stations at planet4589.org/space/plots/gb…

Yaogan-42 02 now being tracked in a 491 x 502 km x 35.0 deg orbit - similar to YG-42 01 but orbit plane is 142 deg away from it.

LAUNCH of 感四十二号02 (Yaogan-42 No. 02) on Apr 20 at 2345 UTC from Xichang on a Chang Zheng 2D.