Three Chinese language astronauts, together with the nation’s solely girl spaceflight engineer, entered the Tiangong house station Wednesday morning following an early morning launch into orbit.
The Shenzhou-19 mission took off with its trio of house explorers from the Jiuquan Satellite tv for pc Launch Heart in northwest China, state information company Xinhua and state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Among the many crew is Wang Haoze, 34, the spaceflight engineer, based on the China Manned House Company (CMSA). She is the third Chinese language girl to participate in a crewed mission.
ADEK BERRY / AFP through Getty Pictures
The crew met with the astronauts from the earlier Shenzhou-18 mission, “beginning a brand new spherical of in-orbit crew handover,” Xinhua mentioned.
The brand new Tiangong crew will perform experiments with an eye fixed towards the house program’s aim of putting astronauts on the Moon by 2030 and ultimately setting up a lunar base.
The house company deemed the launch a “full success,” Xinhua mentioned, noting that the spaceship separated from the rocket it was on and entered its designated orbit about 10 minutes after taking off.
Xinhua later mentioned the spaceship had “made a quick, automated rendezvous and docking with the entrance port of the house station’s core module Tianhe.”
The crew will return to Earth in late April or early Could subsequent yr, CMSA Deputy Director Lin Xiqiang mentioned at a press occasion forward of the launch. The present crew is scheduled to return to Earth on November 4. They have been on the house station for six months.
China’s bold house targets
China has ramped up plans to attain its “house dream” underneath President Xi Jinping.
It constructed an area station after being stored out of the Worldwide House Station, largely on account of U.S. issues over the Chinese language Communist Social gathering’s navy arm’s total management over the house program, The Related Press factors out, including that Beijing’s moon program is a part of a rising rivalry with the U.S. and others, Japan and India amongst them.
China was the third nation to place people in orbit and has landed robotic rovers on Mars and the moon.
Crewed by groups of three astronauts which might be rotated each six months, the Tiangong house station is this system’s crown jewel.
Beijing says it is on observe to ship a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030, the place it intends to assemble a base on the lunar floor.
Solely the U.S. has landed a crewed spacecraft on the moon to this point.
One experiment the Shenzhou-19 crew’s time aboard Tiangong is scheduled to hold out entails “bricks” constructed from elements imitating lunar soil, CCTV reported.
These things — to be delivered to Tiangong by the Tianzhou-8 cargo ship in November — will likely be examined to see how they fare in excessive radiation, gravity, temperature and different situations.
Because of the excessive price of transporting supplies into house, Chinese language scientists hope to have the ability to use lunar soil for the development of the long run base, CCTV reported.
The Shenzhou-19 mission is primarily about “accumulating further expertise,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer on the Harvard-Smithsonian Heart for Astrophysics, instructed Agence France-Presse.
Whereas this explicit crew’s six-month stint aboard Tiangong might not witness main breakthroughs or feats, it’s nonetheless “very priceless to do,” mentioned McDowell.
China has in latest a long time injected billions of {dollars} into creating a complicated house program on par with these of the USA and Europe.
In 2019, China landed a probe on the far facet of the moon, making it the primary spacecraft ever to take action. In 2021, it landed a small robotic on Mars.
Tiangong, whose core module launched in 2021, is deliberate to be in use for about 10 years.