A British-built weather monitoring spacecraft has been deliberately guided into the Atlantic Ocean, the first time a defunct satellite has been manoeuvred to perform an assisted crash on Earth.

Aeolus, a satellite that has provided data to weather centres across Europe since 2018, was successfully helped to its final resting place by mission controllers at the European Space Agency (Esa).

At around 7pm BST on Friday, Esa’s Space Debris Office said the satellite had entered the atmosphere.

Aeolus was not designed for a controlled re-entry at the end of its mission, but Esa decided to use what little fuel was onboard to steer the probe. It was the first time such a re-entry manoeuvre had been tried.

Under normal circumstances, Aeolus would naturally fall back to Earth, burning up in the planet’s atmosphere.

By crashing it into the ocean,