China makes headway in space program

China’s Shenzhou-14 astronauts are smoothly pushing forward their work in space with various scientific experiments underway, showed a video footage recently released by the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

In the lab module Wentian that was launched on July 24 and docked with the core module Tianhe the day after, astronaut Cai Xuzhe is seen in the video injecting nutrients with a tubing into a pot-grown plant and “thoroughly” looked after the sprout.

The exploration of space-bred vegetable cultivation will be helpful to figure out the impacts on the growth and development of plants and animals in space where the pull of gravity is not very strong, or microgravity.

Other two video clips captured in the core module show the three crew members working on two large research facilities, namely the high microgravity science laboratory cabinet and the container-free material science laboratory cabinet for the following scientific experiments.

The container-free material science laboratory cabinet is the first space material experiment facility in orbit in China, according to the CMSA.

The second large facility onboard Tianhe, the high microgravity science laboratory cabinet, can support frontier scientific research in such areas as relativistic physics and gravitational physics, fluid dynamics and its applications, and material manufacturing mechanisms, the agency said.

China on June 5 launched the crewed spaceship Shenzhou-14, sending three astronauts – the commander Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe – to its space station combination for a six-month mission.

Their space missions include cooperating with the ground team to complete the assembly and construction of the Tiangong space station, developing it from a single-module structure into a national space laboratory with three modules – the core module Tianhe and two lab modules Wentian and Mengtian.

This is the 23rd flight mission since the approval and launch of the country’s manned space program, and the third crewed mission for China’s space station project.