China launched its Wentian space laboratory on Sunday afternoon, sending the country's largest-ever spacecraft to Earth's orbit to become part of the Tiangong space station.
Encased in a 20.5-meter-long payload fairing, the space lab was carried by a Long March 5B rocket that blasted off at 2:22 pm from a coastal service tower in the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province.
After an eight-minute flight, the rocket placed the craft into a low-Earth orbit nearly 400 kilometers above the ground in which Tiangong is travelling.
In the next couple of hours, the Wentian will rendezvous and then dock with the Tiangong station's Tianhe core module, according to the China Manned Space Agency.
After that, the Shenzhou XIV mission crew now flying with Tiangong — mission commander Senior Colonel Chen Dong, Senior Colonel Liu Yang and Senior Colonel Cai Xuzhe — will enter the lab module to check its condition and internal equipment, it said.
In coming weeks, Wentian will be repositioned by a robotic apparatus from the forward docking port to a lateral port, where it will remain and be prepared for long-term operation, the agency noted.
To prepare for the Wentian's arrival, the Tianzhou 3 cargo spacecraft departed from the Tiangong station on July 17 to leave its docking hatch for the coming lab. The cargo ship, which was launched in September and had remained connected to Tiangong since then, will be guided by ground controllers to fall back to Earth in due course.
Zhan Xiaohong, Professor, School of Materials Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Currently, Tiangong consists of the Tianhe module, the Tianzhou 4 cargo ship and the Shenzhou XIV spacecraft.
At Wenchang Cosmodrome, many young people from Jiangsu worked hard in different positions to ensure the successful launch of the Wentian experimental module.
Yin Hang, System Engineer, Technical Department, Xichang Satellite Launch Center
Zhang Wei, Engineer of Wenchang Control Station, Xichang Satellite Launch Center
When Wentian is connected to the Tianhe module, its airlock cabin will replace the one on Tianhe to become the major place for astronauts to put on their spacewalk suits and move out of the space station.
Zhang Peng from Yixing county of Jiangsu has been working here for ten years. During this launch mission, he led the team to carefully study the characteristics of the mission, innovatively carried out UAV tracking training so that through optical, telemetry, and radar equipment, rocket flight statistics are measured, and efforts are made to capture faster, track more steadily, and measure more accurately.
Zhang Peng, Deputy Director of Tongguling Measurement and Control Station of Wenchang Launch Site Command and Control Center
