The third and final module arrived at China’s Tiangong Space Station.
The Mengtian module entered Earth orbit atop a Long March 5B heavy rocket from Wenchang, southern China, at 3:37 a. m. m. EDT (07:37 GMT and 3:37 p. m. Beijing time) on Monday, October 31, according to state-run Xinhua News (opens in new tab).
Mengtian arrived at Tiangong as scheduled about thirteen hours after liftoff, according to China’s Manned Space Agency (opens in a new tab).
The launch marked China’s ninth station-like project since it launched the Tianhe core module into orbit in April last year.
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Mengtian, whose name is “Dreaming of the Heavens,” is a 58. 7-foot-long (17. 9-meter) spacecraft about 48,500 pounds (22 metric tons) designed primarily to space out a series of racks and clinical experiments.
The device aboard Mengtian will be used for experiments similar to microgravity, fluid physics, tissue science, combustion science, basic physics and more.
Mengtian’s docking at Tiangong marks the end of the area station’s gathering phase and the beginning of full operations, Chinese area officials said. Mengtian’s arrival allowed China to realize a vision of an approved area station in 1992.
Tiangong Area Station is composed of Tianhe, Mengtian, and a module called Wentian. The T-shaped Tiangong will house 3 astronauts for six months at a time, or six team members for short-era equipment transfers.
The Tiangong team’s first move is scheduled for before the end of the year, when astronauts from the ongoing Shenzhou 14 project will welcome aboard the new Shenzhou 1five team, which will be featured on a Long March 2F rocket from the Gobi Desert. Before that, China will launch the project of sending five Tianzhou to Tiangong in November to deliver materials to the team’s new expedition.
So far, Tiangong has hosted 3 team projects, starting with the 3-month Shenzhou 12 project from June to September 2021. The Shenzhou thirteen team showed up in October of that year and returned to Earth on April 16. Shenzhou 14 astronauts Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe have been in orbit since the fifth of June and are on board to obtain the Wentian and Mengtian science modules.
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There are also more plans for Tiangong, in addition to hosting official science systems and astronauts. The space station will also feature a hard-sounding space telescope called Xuntian that China plans to launch in late 2023. The Hubble-class observatory will operate in a Tiangong-like orbit, meaning it will be able to dock with the station to refuel, upgrade and repair.
Meanwhile, China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, said earlier this year that Tiangong would possibly be open to tourism in the future.
While China celebrates Mengtian’s successful launch, there will most likely be some degree of consequences from the mission. The 3’s massive early stages in the past introduced Long March 5B rockets that entered orbit and made high-level out-of-control re- The entries about a week after launch. The energetic return to the top ground since the launch of the Wentian module in July has been seen by viewers in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Most likely, the waning orbit of the last level of the rocket will attract foreign attention.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 6:45 p. m. m. EDT on October 31 with the news of Mengtian’s arrival at Tiangong area station.
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Andrew is a freelance area journalist who specializes in reporting on China’s fast-growing area sector. He began writing for Space. com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky.
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