Chinese astronauts healthy after longest space mission

Jing (C), commander of the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft, Liu (R) and Liu Yang/XINHUA

At the Astronaut Center of China in northwest suburb Beijing, Jing Haipeng, commander of the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft, Liu Wang and Liu Yang, China’s first female in space, met the press and shared their experiences of the 13-day mission, the longest one so far for the country.

The Shenzhou-9 spacecraft was boosted into a low-earth orbit on June 16, and the crew succeeded in manually docking the spacecraft with China’s first space lab in-orbit Tiangong-1 one week later, paving the way for the construction of a space station.

After the crew safely re-entered the atmosphere and landed on June 29, the three astronauts were quarantined to re-adapt themselves to the earth’s gravity and recover heath conditions.

According to Chen Shanguang, director of the astronaut centre, the three astronauts will be in rehabilitation from mid July to the end of the month. After that, researchers need to monitor their health conditions for another three months to ensure a complete recovery.

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Xinhua News Agency, founded on November 7, 1931, is China’s national news agency as well as a global news and information network. Xinhua has set up a global news and information gathering network, with headquarters in Beijing, 33 domestic bureaus in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities plus the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as 140 bureaus in the rest of the world. Xinhua is yet to set up a bureau in Taiwan, where it has posted resident correspondents. Xinhua provides its worldwide subscribers with news and financial information products in the forms of text, photo, graphics, audio, video, and mobile phone text messages 24 hours a day in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese.

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