HELSINKI — Two Chinese astronauts accomplished a record-setting extravehicular exercise outdoors Tiangong house station Tuesday.
Shenzhou-19 commander Cai Xuzhe, carrying a Feitian extravehicular exercise go well with marked with pink, exited the Wentian experiment module hatch of the Tiangong house station at 11:51 p.m. Eastern, Dec. 16 (0451 UTC, Dec. 17).
Cai hooked up himself to Tiangong’s robotic arm and retrieved tools wanted for the EVA from the airlock, assisted by crewmate Song Lingdong. Song, in a go well with with blue markings, exited Wentian at 1:32 a.m. Dec. 17 (0632 UTC) to carry out his duties, in line with China Central Television (CCTV). Signatures from earlier customers of the spacesuits are seen on the Fetian main life help methods in video of the spacewalk.
Crewmate Wang Haoze assisted operations from inside Tiangong’s Tianhe module, whereas the operation additionally obtained help from the bottom.
Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong returned to the Wentian module and closed the hatch at 8:57 a.m. Eastern (1357 UTC), in line with China’s human spaceflight company, CMSEO. The astronauts carried out set up of house particles safety units, the inspection and dealing with of exterior tools and services.
The set up of protecting panels was described as to guard cables and pipelines of the thermal management tools outdoors the Tianhe module from particles, CCTV reported, citing a researcher from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), which constructed and launched the house station modules.
The EVA period of 9 hours, 6 minutes seems to surpass the earlier file for a spacewalk of 8 hours, 56 minutes set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms in the course of the STS-102 mission in 2001.
Notably, the China National Space Administration has beforehand acknowledged that Feitian fits are designed to help a working time of eight hours, whereas having a service lifetime of three years and can be utilized 15 instances.
CMSEO and Chinese state media Xinhua reported the EVA as a file period of extravehicular actions by Chinese astronauts.
The spacewalk was the primary of the Shenzhou-19 mission. CMSA introduced the occasion would happen “within the close to future” Dec. 16. It is the seventeenth spacewalk outdoors of Tiangong. China’s first spacewalk happened in 2008 in the course of the Shenzhou-7 mission.
The Shenzhou-19 spacecraft arrived at Tiangong Oct. 29 for a six-month-long keep aboard the house station. It is Cai’s second mission to house, following his participation within the 2022 Shenzhou-14 mission, throughout which he launched into an EVA. It is the primary mission to house for Song and Wang.
The Tianzhou-8 cargo spacecraft arrived on the orbital outpost Nov. 15 to ship provides, gasoline and experiments.
Shenzhou-19 is China’s 14th crewed spaceflight mission so far. The crew will conduct numerous extravehicular actions and can perform 86 science experiments and tasks, in line with CMSEO. Various these are associated to life sciences, together with finding out fruit flies in a sub-magnetic facility.
China accepted its Tiangong house station plan in 1992. It started constructing the three-module, T-shaped low Earth orbit outpost in 2021. It was accomplished in late 2022. CMSEO is getting ready to develop Tiangong within the coming years.
