China’s first space station Tiangong-1 has descended from the heavens and burned up.

Launched in 2011, Tiangong-1 (which translates to mean Heavenly Palace 1) served as an experimental space lab and a way for the government to master things like docking.

The station was meant to re-enter the atmosphere via a controlled firing of the engines but in 2016 ground teams lost communication and control of Tiangong-1. The station remained intact for a number of years but earlier this year the European Space Agency (ESA) noted that the the station was in a decaying orbit some 280 kilometres above us.

The space station (or at least the parts that weren’t burnt to nothing during re-entry) crashed near to the South Pacific Ocean Unpopulated Area colloquially known as the spacecraft cemetery.

“The location of the reentry was, by chance, not too far from the so-called South Pacific Ocean Unpopulated Area. The SPOUA has long been used by many space agencies including ESA, to dispose of end-of-life spacecraft through controlled reentries,” said the ESA in a blog post.

China plans to start construction of a manned space station in 2019 with plans to launch it skyward by 2022.

[Image – CC0 Pixabay]