Three Chinese astronauts enter space station for crew rotation

Beijing | Three Chinese astronauts aboard a spaceship entered China's space station in the early hours of Friday and met with another astronaut trio, starting a new round of in-orbit crew handover.

The crew manning the station called Tiangong for the past six months opened the hatch at 1:17 am (Beijing Time) and greeted the new arrivals, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

The six crew members took group pictures for the sixth space get-together in China's aerospace history.

They will live and work together for about five days to complete planned tasks and handover work, the CMSA said.

The Shenzhou-19 crew is scheduled to return to the Dongfeng landing site in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on April 29, it said.

Earlier the spaceship successfully docked with the space station late on Thursday night.

Before that, the Shenzhou-20 crewed spaceship carrying the three astronauts was successfully launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China.

The spaceship is carrying three astronauts, Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie.

China rotates a three-member crew manning the space station every six months.

Shenzhou-20 is the 35th flight mission of China's manned space programme and the fifth crewed mission during the application and development stage of China's space station.

The crew will conduct new life science experiments involving zebrafish, planarians and streptomyces, the CMSA spokesman Lin Xiqiang told the media on Wednesday.

China built its space station after it was reportedly excluded from the International Space Station (ISS) over concerns that China's space programme is manned by its military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

It is currently the only country to have a space station while the ISS is a collaborative project of several countries.

The launch day coincided with China's 10th Space Day. The country designated April 24 as its Space Day in 2016 to mark the successful launch of its first satellite, Dongfanghong-1 on the day in 1970.

Separately, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced on Thursday that scientists from institutions in France, Germany, Japan, Pakistan, the UK and the US have been granted the opportunity to borrow lunar samples collected by the Chang'e-5 mission for scientific research.

In 2020, China's Chang'e-5 mission retrieved samples from the moon weighing about 1,731 grams.