Three Chinese language astronauts — Chen Dong, Liu Yang, and Cai Xuzhe — have arrived at China’s new house station, which is presently below development. The three will keep on the station for six months, managing the arrival of two new modules to be added to the station: One referred to as Wentian which is able to launch in July, and one other referred to as Mengtian which is able to launch in October.
They will even conduct scientific experiments and examine gear on the station, prepared for it to start full operations as soon as accomplished.
The three astronauts on the Shenzhou-14 mission had been launched utilizing a Lengthy March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite tv for pc Launch Heart in northwest China at 10:44 p.m. ET (7:44 p.m. PT) on Saturday, June 4. In keeping with the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), the astronauts traveled for round seven hours earlier than arriving on the house station’s core module, Tianhe, and docking there to its radial port.
The astronauts’ craft joined two cargo crafts already docked on the station, Tianzhou-3 and Tianzhou-4. Docking used an automatic process at was accomplished at 5:42 a.m. ET (2:42 a.m. PT) on Sunday, June 5.
The station, named Tiangong which suggests “heavenly palace”, has been within the works for a while with its first module launching final yr. It replaces the earlier station Tiangong-2 which burned up within the environment in 2019. Tiangong-2 was a small station so astronauts solely spent one month at a time there. However the brand new station can be bigger, and a trio of astronauts has already spent six months there, getting ready for the station’s operations.
The Wentian module which the astronauts predict in October contains crew quarters, in line with space.com, so three new astronauts might be a part of the present crew as soon as the module is put in. This is able to be the Shenzhou-15 mission, set to launch in December, and could be the primary time that one crew fingers over operating of the station to a different with each units of astronauts on board for a couple of days.
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