Three astronauts who lived for 90 days on China’s space station departed
Thursday in preparation for returning to Earth.
The national space agency said Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo
boarded the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft and undocked from the space station at
8:56 a.m. Thursday (0056 GMT).
State broadcaster CCTV aired footage of the astronauts securing packages
inside their spacecraft, which is due to parachute to a location in the Gobi
Desert near the Jiuquan launch center on Friday.
The astronauts have already set China’s record for the most time spent in
space. After launching on June 17, mission commander Nie and astronauts Liu
and Tang went on two spacewalks, deployed a 10-meter (33-foot) mechanical
arm, and had a video call with Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.
Before the undocking, the astronauts downloaded data from their experiments
and ensured the station would continue operating without a crew, CCTV
reported.
The journey home is expected to take at least 30 hours, CCTV said. Before
departing, Nie and his colleagues expressed their thanks for the
“round-the-clock support and devotion from all the staff.”
Four drills have been conducted on the ground at the Dongfeng landing site
in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to ensure the safe return
of the crew.
While few details have been made public by China’s military, which runs the
space program, astronaut trios are expected to be brought on 90-day missions
to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional.
The government has not announced the names of the next set of astronauts nor
the launch date of Shenzhou-13.
China has sent 14 astronauts into space since 2003, when it became only the
third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to do so
on its own.
When completed with the addition of two more modules, the station will weigh
in at about 66 tons, a fraction of the size of the International Space
Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh around 450
tons when completed.
In preparation for the permanent station, China launched two experimental
modules over the past decade.Tiangong-1 was abandoned before it burned up
during an uncontrolled loss of orbit. It’s successor, the Tiangong-2, was
brought out of orbit in 2018 under full control.
China launched its bid to build such facilities in the early 1990s following
successes in earlier missions and its exclusion from the International Space
Station, largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese program’s secretive
nature and close military ties.
U.S. law requires congressional approval for contact between the American
and Chinese space programs, but China is cooperating with space experts from
other countries, including France, Sweden, Russia and Italy.
China has also pushed ahead with un-crewed missions, particularly in lunar
exploration. It has placed a rover on the little-explored far side of the
Moon and in December, the Chang’e 5 probe returned lunar rocks to Earth for
the first time since the 1970s.
China this year also landed its Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, with its
accompanying Zhurong rover venturing out to look for evidence of life.
Another program calls for collecting soil from an asteroid, something that
has been a particular focus of Japan’s rival space program.
China also plans to dispatch another mission in 2024 to bring back lunar
samples and has expressed a desire to land people on the moon and possibly
build a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for
such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under
development.
China’s space program has advanced in a steady, cautious manner and has
largely avoided the failures that marked the U.S. and Russian programs that
were locked in intense competition during the heady early days of
spaceflight.
No comments:
Post a Comment