Last month, TechRadar wrote about a team of Russian engineers building a satellite that would appear as the brightest object in the sky, but at the time there didn't seem to be any real purpose to the mission.
Now, however, the project leaders have announced that the Mayak spacecraft will carry a prototype aerobraking system that could help combat the problem of space junk.
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.