Two Chinese language language astronauts merely secured a spot in spaceflight historic previous.
Cai Xuzhe and Tune Lingdong, part of China’s three-person Shenzhou 19 mission, spent better than 9 hours spacewalking exterior the Tiangong space station from late Monday night (Dec. 16) by Tuesday morning (Dec. 17), consistent with officers with China’s Manned Home Engineering Office (CMSEO).
That broke the ancient times doc for a single extravehicular train (EVA), which was eight hours and 56 minutes, consistent with NASA. That mark was set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms exterior the Worldwide Home Station once more in March 2001.
This week’s EVA was the first for the Shenzhou 19 mission, which arrived at Tiangong on Oct. 29 for a six-month maintain.
In the midst of the spacewalk, Cai and Tune — along with crewmate Wang Haoze, who remained inside Tiangong — “labored intently collectively, and with the assistance of the realm station’s robotic arm and ground scientific researchers, achieved the arrange of the realm station’s space particles security machine, the inspection and disposal of extravehicular instruments and facilities, and completely different duties,” CMSEO officers acknowledged in a WeChat exchange on Tuesday.
“The extravehicular actions had been a complete success,” they added, moreover noting that Tune, 34, “grew to develop into China’s first astronaut born inside the Nineteen Nineties to conduct extravehicular actions.”
In response to SpaceNews, the spacewalk began on Monday at 11:51 p.m. EDT (0451 GMT on Dec. 17), when Cai, the Shenzhou 19 commander, exited Tiangong’s Wentian module. Tune adopted go nicely with better than 90 minutes later, at 1:32 a.m. EDT (0632 GMT).
Every astronauts went once more inside Wentian at 8:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT) on Tuesday, CMSEO officers wrote inside the exchange. These numbers put the EVA’s interval at 9 hours and 6 minutes, meaning it broke the earlier doc by merely 10 minutes.
The record-setting EVA was the seventeenth normal exterior of Tiangong, consistent with SpaceNews. The realm station’s core module, known as Tianhe, reached orbit in April 2021. Two additional modules — Wentian and Mengtian — arrived in July 2022 and November 2022, respectively, ending the T-shaped orbital outpost.