Taikonauts Nie Haisheng , Liu Boming , and Tang Hongbo have safely docked with China ’s Tiangong Space Station , making them the first gang penis of the fresh space place and the first Chinese " space traveler " to launch in nearly five years .
China began constructing the modular orbital laboratory ( whose name means Heavenly Palace ) a few calendar month ago and currently consists of its core module , Tianhe ( River in the Heavens , also a nickname for the Milky Way ) . They will spend the next three months there bringing the module into serve , presently orbiting at 380 klick ( 236 miles ) above Earth .
Thetrio launchedyesterday , June 17 , at 9:22 am Bejing time ( 1:22 am UTC ) onboard the Shenzhou 12 spacecraft from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at the edge of the Gobi Desert . It docked to Tianhe six hr and 32 minute later .
video of the whole tying up play have been divvy up by theChinese National Space Agency . There are several photographic camera around Tianhe and Shenzhou so the appendage has a very cinematographic look and sense to it .
The mission is expected to last 90 days and it will sport two spacewalks . The team will conduct experiments on board as well as hold set thanks to the recitation machine equipped in the core faculty of Tiangong .
The ruined quad station will be about one - one-fifth of the flock of theInternational Space Station(ISS ) and will orb at a similar height of between 340 and 450 kilometer ( 210 and 280 miles ) . The ISS is kept at around 420 kilometre ( 260 miles).Two experiment moduleswill be launch next year . The first , Wentian ( mean Quest for Heavens ) , is expect to set up around May - June 2022 , followed about three month later by Mengtian ( meaning Dreaming of Heavens ) .
The late addition will be a class telescope module called Xuntian ( whose genuine import is Touring the Shangri-la ) . The telescope is going to have a primary mirror 2 meter ( 6.6 feet ) in diameter with a field of opinion 300 metre larger than veteran quad scope Hubble . Over the 10 - yr basal mission , Xuntian is expected to image 40 percentage of the sky with its 2.5 gigapixel camera .
Shenzou 13 is expected to wing with the next crew of taikonauts in October , with the follow gang set in motion in late spring and late fall of 2022 .
