Northrop Grumman's SS Sally Ride departs International Space Station

April 21 (UPI) -- Northrop Grumman's autonomous Cygnus spaceship left the International Space Station on Friday, carrying away more than 8,000 pounds of trash from the orbiting laboratory.

The SS Sally Ride, named after the first American woman astronaut, departed from the Unity module of the ISS about 7:20 a.m. EDT.

The vessel burned up in a planned re-entry into the atmosphere shortly afterward.

"Following a deorbit engine firing later in the evening, Cygnus will begin a planned destructive re-entry, in which the spacecraft -- filled with trash packed by the station crew -- will safely burn up in Earth's atmosphere," NASA said ahead of the departure.

United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi oversaw the spacecraft's systems as flight controllers on the ground maneuvered the ISS's Canadarm2 robotic arm to remove the SS Sally Ride from the Earth-facing port of the Unity module.

In November, the spacecraft blasted off from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to bring experiments to the ISS, in addition to carrying the first satellites from Uganda and Zimbabwe as part of the Joint Global Multi-Nation Birds Project-5. Those help distinguish bare ground from forest and farmland and indicate the quality of agricultural growth.

Cygnus, one of three spacecraft that send cargo to the ISS, was designed to eventually burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, along with Russia's Progress space vehicle. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is designed to splash down for reuse.