Shenzhou-19 crew returns to Earth
發佈日期: 2025-04-30 19:36
TVB News
The three Shenzhou-19 astronauts are finally home after a six-month journey in space.
Their spaceship successfully touched down at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia around midday, despite an earlier delay caused by poor weather.
Danni Zhou tells us more.
The orbital and return capsules of Shenzhou-19 undocked from China's Tiangong space station in the wee hours of today. Eight hours later, the spaceship's return capsule separated from the orbital capsule and headed back to Earth from a height of 390 kilometres.
The astronaunts of the recently launched Shenzhou-20 spacecraft watched the livestreamed event in the space station.
There was an outage of communication with the ground during the capsule's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
Footage from state media showed the moment when the return capsule's main parachute opened up.
At about 1:08 p.m., Shenzhou-19's three-person crew -- Cai Xuzhe, Song Lingdong and Wang Haoze -- touched down at the landing site in China's Gobi Desert where support teams were on standby.
Medical experts conducted initial health checks, and authorities say all three astronauts are in good condition.
Fourty minutes later, the trio were helped out from the capsule one by one.
Cai, the mission commander, said the crew made a concerted effort to accomplish this highly anticipated task, and they would keep up the high morale to make new contributions to the country's aerospace development.
The two young astronauts, Song and Wang, elaborated on their exhilaration and happiness on completing their first flight.
They said they took pride in themselves for successfully translating the researchers' hard work into various scientific and technological results over the past 180 plus days, with a pledge to take on more challenging tasks in the future.
The trio were later loaded onto vehicles for a thorough physical examination.
