Space junk--both manufactured and natural--has been orbiting our planet and threatening satellites and spacecraft with collisions. And accordingly, engineers and scientists have been devising ways to get rid of the mess. But whether it's a spacefaring robot or spacecraft carrying nets or traps, it requires power, and that's an expensive prospect. So, engineers at the Tsinghua University in Beijing have proposed a design concept for a space debris engine that can eat its way through the junk and convert it into plasma fuel to sustain its mission
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
