Mission was completed by three chinese astronauts who returned to earth after a six-month mission aboard china’s space station. the mission was declared a “complete success” by china’s space agency, making china the third country in history to have put both astronauts into space and to build a space station, after the soviet union and the us. the new crew of three chinese astronauts arrived at the space station to make its first in-orbit crew handover on wednesday.
Crew touched down on board the shenzhou-14 spacecraft on sunday in china’s autonomous region of inner mongolia. the new crew will live on the station for six months, while china has opened the selection process for astronauts for future missions to applicants from the “special administrative regions” of macau and hong kong.
New crew will focus on installing equipment and facilities around the space station. in the past 10 years, china has launched more than 200 rockets and sent an unmanned mission to the moon, called chang’e 5, to collect and return rock samples. the crew also oversaw the arrival of the second and third modules for tiangong and carried out three spacewalks to check and test the new facilities. this is the last of 11 missions required to assemble the station that is expected to operate for around a decade and run experiments in near-zero gravity.
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