Space Junk Solution? Japan Would Use a Tether to Nab Debris & Destroy It

The Japanese space agency will soon be testing a new technology that would use a roughly half-mile-long tether to grab large pieces of space debris and dispose of them. The proposed technology (first announced in 2014) would include a spacecraft that would deploy a 700-meter-long (2,296 feet) electrodynamic tether (EDT) and guide it toward a piece of space junk. The tether would latch onto the orbiting hunk of trash, and the operating spacecraft would then drag the debris down into the incinerator of Earth's atmosphere (causing the operating spacecraft to burn up as well). More

(Source: Space.com - Dec 17)