Shenzhou-16 Astronauts Complete First Spacewalk | China Space Station

Shenzhou-16 Astronauts Complete First Spacewalk | China Space Station

The Shenzhou-16 astronauts aboard China's space station Tiangong completed their first spacewalk on Thursday, July 20, 2023, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). Astronauts Jing Haipeng and Zhu Yangzhu, together with Gui Haichao, China's first civilian astronaut who supported his crewmates from inside the space station, collaborated to accomplish all set tasks. Jing opened the hatch of the airlock cabin at 13:45 after receiving an order from the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center. Jing and Zhu returned safely to the Wentian lab module as of 21:40, after around eight hours of extravehicular activities. During the extravehicular activities, they completed several tasks, including installing and lifting the support frame for a panoramic camera outside the Tianhe core module, and unlocking and lifting two panoramic cameras outside the Mengtian lab module. The whole process went smoothly and successfully.

This was the first spacewalk for Jing, who is on his fourth spaceflight. Zhu has become China's first flight engineer to take part in extravehicular activities.

During the about-eight-hour spacewalk, Jing docked at more than 30 locations with the support of the robotic arm and Zhu climbed over 100 handrails on the module wall.

"This mission involved a relatively high workload due to the presence of four work sites, which were distributed in the core and Mengtian lab modules. As a result, the travel distance was also relatively long, particularly for the astronaut tasked with conducting autonomous transfer in the extravehicular activity, as the route he would take outside the spacecraft will be very long," said Wang Yanlei, director of the astronauts selection and training department of the China Astronaut Research and Training Center.

The Shenzhou-16 crew, as planned, will carry out a large number of space science experiments and complete multiple extravehicular installation tasks of application loads in the future.

Credit: CCTV Video News Agency

Duration: 2 minutes 48 seconds

Release Date: July 21, 2023

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