China launched three astronauts to its now fully operational space station as part of crew rotation, marking the fifth manned mission to the Chinese space outpost since 2021.
China launched three astronauts
The spacecraft, Shenzhou-16, or “Divine Vessel,” and its three passengers launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China’s Gobi Desert at 9:31 a.m. (0131 GMT) atop a Long March-2F rocket.
The Shenzhou-16 astronauts will replace the three-person crew of the Shenzhou-15, who arrived at the space station in late November.
The station, which is made up of three modules, was finished at the end of last year after 11 crewed and uncrewed missions since April 2021, beginning with the launch of the first and largest module, the station’s main living quarters.
China has already announced plans to expand its permanently inhabited space station, with the next module set to dock with the current T-shaped structure to form a cross-shaped structure.
Jing Haipeng, 56, a senior spacecraft pilot from China’s first batch of astronaut trainees in the late 1990s, led the Shenzhou-16 mission. He would been to space three times before, twice as the mission commander.
Jing was in the same flight as Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao, both 36 and members of China’s third batch of astronauts. This is Zhu and Gui’s first space mission.
Former military university professor Zhu will serve as the mission’s spaceflight engineer, while Gui, a Beihang University professor, will serve as the mission’s payload specialist, managing science experiments in space station.
This year, Beijing is expected to launch one more crewed mission to the orbiting outpost. China is also planning to launch a space telescope the size of a large bus by the end of 2023.
The orbital telescope, known as Xuntian, or “Surveying the Heavens” in Chinese, will have a field of view 350 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched 33 years ago.
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