China’s solely lady spaceflight engineer will likely be amongst a crew of three astronauts blasting off on a “dream” mission to the Tiangong area station this week, Beijing introduced Tuesday.
The brand new Tiangong crew will perform experiments with a watch to the area programme’s formidable purpose of inserting astronauts on the Moon by 2030 and finally setting up a lunar base.
The Shenzhou-19 mission is scheduled to take off with its trio of area explorers at 4:27am Wednesday (2027 GMT Tuesday) from the Jiuquan Satellite tv for pc Launch Middle in northwest China, the China Manned House Company (CMSA) stated.
Among the many crew is Wang Haoze, 34, who’s China’s solely feminine spaceflight engineer, in keeping with the company. She is going to change into the third Chinese language lady to participate in a crewed mission.
“Like everybody else, I dream of going to the area station to take a look,” Wang advised a media gathering Tuesday alongside her fellow crew members, lined up behind podiums and tall panes of glass to seal them off from the general public.
“I need to meticulously full every job and defend our dwelling in area,” she stated.
“I additionally need to journey in deep area and wave on the stars.”
Headed by Cai Xuzhe, the crew will return to Earth in “late April or early Might subsequent yr”, CMSA Deputy Director Lin Xiqiang stated at a separate press occasion confirming the launch.
Cai, a 48-year-old former air pressure pilot, brings expertise from a earlier stint aboard Tiangong as a part of the Shenzhou-14 mission in 2022.
“Having been chosen for the brand new crew, taking over a brand new position, going through new duties and new challenges, I really feel the honour of my mission with a fantastic duty,” stated Cai.
The aerospace veteran added that the crew was now “totally ready mentally, technically, bodily and psychologically” for the mission forward.
Finishing the astronaut lineup is 34-year-old man Track Lingdong.
The crew at present aboard the Tiangong area station is scheduled to return to Earth on November 4 after finishing handover procedures with the incoming astronauts, Lin stated.
‘House dream’
China has ramped up plans to attain its “area dream” underneath President Xi Jinping.
The nation’s area programme was the third to place people in orbit and has additionally landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon.
Crewed by groups of three astronauts which are exchanged each six months, the Tiangong area station is the programme’s crown jewel.
Beijing says it’s on monitor to ship a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030, the place it intends to assemble a base on the lunar floor.
The Shenzhou-19 crew’s time aboard Tiangong will see them perform varied experiments, together with some involving “bricks” constructed from elements imitating lunar soil, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
This stuff — 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 value of transporting supplies into area, Chinese language scientists hope to have the ability to use lunar soil for the development of the longer term base, CCTV reported.
The Shenzhou-19 mission is primarily about “accumulating further expertise”, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer on the Harvard-Smithsonian Middle for Astrophysics in america, advised AFP.
Whereas this specific swap of astronaut crews and upcoming six-month stint aboard Tiangong might not witness main breakthroughs or feats, it’s nonetheless “very priceless to do”, stated McDowell.
China has in latest many years injected billions of {dollars} into creating a complicated area programme on par with america and Europe.
In 2019, China efficiently landed its Chang’e-4 probe on the far facet of the moon — 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 for use for about 10 years.