A cargo ship has undocked from China’s space station and will soon burn up in the atmosphere after completing its mission.
The uncrewed Tianzhou 4 detached from the docking hub of the Tiangong space station on Wednesday (Nov. 9) at 1:55 a.m. EDT (0655 GMT), China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, announced.
"After the Tianzhou 4 separated from the orbiting station, we will independently monitor and control the Tianzhou 4 cargo spacecraft. Some related experiments will be carried out in the next step," Wang Saijin, deputy chief engineer of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, told CCTV.
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The 35-foot-long (10.6 meters) freighter will perform a controlled reentry into the atmosphere in the near future over the South Pacific, as with earlier Tianzhou missions.
Tianzhou 4 launched to Tiangong atop a Long March 7 rocket on May 9 of this year, delivering thousands of pounds of supplies to support the three Shenzhou 14 astronauts that arrived weeks later for a six-month-long stay aboard Tiangong.
China’s next cargo mission, Tianzhou 5, rolled out to the pad at Wenchang on the same day as Tianzhou 4 undocked.
Tianzhou 5 is expected to launch early Saturday morning (Nov. 12) and will deliver supplies for the upcoming Shenzhou 15 crewed mission.
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