With all three crew aboard, at around 0318 GMT on 24 June, the Chinese manned Shenzhou 9 spacecraft undocked from Tiangong 1 mini-space station and moved approximately 400 metres away from the craft. The Shenzhou 9 craft, piloted by taikonaut Liu Wang, then approached Tiangong 1 to conduct a manual docking. The two craft were successfully manually redocked at 0448 GMT.
The test was to prove that the manual docking method was also a viable procedure should the automatic docking system ever fail.