The Mid-Autumn Festival, as an anniversary traditional Chinese holiday, we still keep on soaking it in. On the very night, as the first genuine space lab, China’s space lab Tiangong II blasted off successfully.
In a cloud of smoke underneath a mid-autumn full moon, Tiangong II roared into the air at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gobi Desert, on the back of a Long March-2F T2 rocket at 10:04 p.m. Beijing Time.
The Tiangong II, marking another milestone in its increasingly ambitious space program, which envisions a mission to Mars by the end of this decade and its own space station by around 2020. And the space officials said that it will become the country’s largest scientific platform in space.
The lab will undergo preparations in space for about one month before the Shenzhou XI manned spacecraft, in a flight scheduled for mid-October, will take two astronauts to the lab to enter it.
The astronauts will stay inside the lab for 30 days. The lab will be monitored and controlled mainly by the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center.
Its predecessor, Tiangong I, was launched in September 2011 and was mainly used to test technologies involved in space rendezvous and docking.
By comparison, the Tiangong II will conduct more than 40 scientific and technological experiments together with the Shenzhou XI.
That is many more than those carried out by the Tiangong I and three previous Shenzhou spacecraft, according to Wu Ping, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency.
And in April 2017, China's first space cargo ship Tianzhou I, which literally means heavenly vessel, will be sent into orbit to dock with the space lab, providing fuel and other supplies.