Three Chinese astronauts have successfully completed a manual docking between the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and the orbiting Tiangong-1 lab module in the first such attempt in China's history of space exploration, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.
Astronaut Liu Yang, assisted by his teammates Jing Haipeng and Liu Yang, controlled the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft to dock with the Tiangong-1 space lab module at 12:42 p.m. local time on Sunday.
“It means China has completely grasped space rendezvous and docking technologies and the country is fully capable of transferring humans and cargo to an orbiter in space, which is essential for building a space station,” the agency said.
About one and half hours before the docking, the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft parted from Tiangong-1 to the berth point of 400 meters away from the module.
To leave room for adjustment, engineers set up four berth points for the spaceship on the same orbit 5 km, 400 meters, 140 meters and 30 meters away from the orbiting lab.
The spacecraft and the space lab were joined together by an automated docking on June 18. Shenzhou-9 was sent into space on June 16 from a launch center in northwest China's Gobi desert.
A highly sophisticated space maneuver, manual docking, requires the astronaut to link together two orbiters traveling at 7.8 kilometers a second in space.
The astronauts will return to the Tiangong-1 lab module from the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft hours after the manual docking procedure to continue with experiments and research in space.
Manned docking with the space lab module is part of China's ambitious project to start building a 60-ton space station by about 2020.
