Yesterday, three Chinese astronauts (aka taikonauts) back to Earth to end the Shenzhou 13 mission. The mission was the second spaceflight to build China’s first space station, Tiangong.
The Shenzhou 13 crew of Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert last October. The crew then spent 183 days on the Tiangong space station, setting 180 days (or six months) as the regular amount of time China’s future crews will spend in orbit. It was the longest mission in the history of China’s manned space program.
It took the astronauts nine hours to land on Earth’s surface after detaching the return capsule from Tiangong’s Galactic core module. The capsule touched down in Inner Mongolia at 9:56 a.m. local time, Saturday morning. In an interview on state television, Astronaut Wang Yaping said, “I want to tell my daughter, mom has returned from touching the stars.”
Wang Yaping has become the first Chinese female astronaut to perform a spacewalk during the mission. The crew also teaches physics lessons to high school students across China. However, much of the task involved testing the station’s capabilities.
Even so, it is still 157 days short of the longest mission of the International Space Station (ISS), where American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko spent 340 days in space since March 2015 to March next year. NASA conducted medical experiments to observe the effects of living long in orbit, using Scott Kelly’s twin brother and retired astronaut Mark Kelly as reference points on Earth.
China’s space program has two more Shenzhou missions scheduled for 2022. These two missions aim to complete construction of the Tiangong space station before the end of the year. Two more modules will be attached to the Galaxy module. The finished Tiangong will be about 20% the size of the ISS.
