Scene set for astronauts' return
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, June 26, 2012
Preparations are under way for the return of China's Shenzhou 9 spacecraft and its crew of three to an area of grassland in the country's north on Friday.
![After a successful docking, the three Shenzhou 9 crew members enter the space lab to perform a series of scheduled scientific experiments. [ Photo/ Xinhua ]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20120626/001372acd0b511534fd502.jpg "After a successful docking, the three Shenzhou 9 crew members enter the space lab to perform a series of scheduled scientific experiments. [ Photo/ Xinhua ]") |
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After a successful docking, the three Shenzhou 9 crew members enter the space lab to perform a series of scheduled scientific experiments. [ Photo/ Xinhua ] |
Personnel responsible for retrieval, search and rescue missions have arrived at the landing area in Siziwang Banner of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and drills are being held in advance of the landing.
All eight previous Shenzhou spacecraft have landed in the sparsely populated area where most people are engaged in farming on the grassland.
The astronauts on board Shenzhou 9 - Liu Wang, Jing Haipeng and Liu Yang, China's first woman in space - conducted the country's first manual space docking procedure on Sunday with the orbiting Tiangong 1 lab module and have lived in the country's trial space station for about a week.
The spacecraft will separate from the module and begin its flight back to Earth on Thursday. The return module with the three crew will separate from the spacecraft after it enters the Earth's atmosphere.
Parachutes will help reduce the speed of the module as it falls and a rocket will fire to further slow the module shortly before it lands.
Wu Ping, a spokeswoman for China's manned space program, said an upgraded video monitoring system had been installed around the landing zone to transmit details to the control center in Beijing.
Search teams will be able to locate the module after it lands in the fastest time possible after many drills, she said.
Landing is considered the most dangerous phase of the mission apart from the launch as the return module has to crash to the ground. China doesn't possess a space shuttle like the United States which can land on a runway just like ordinary aircraft.
The next space mission will see Shenzhou 10 dock with Tiangong 1 with astronauts onboard, Wu said. She said detailed plans would be made after the completion of the current Shenzhou-9 mission.
China will train and send foreign astronauts into space on Shenzhou spacecraft in the future, Wu said.
The country has been cooperating with Pakistan on space exploration, she said.
"However," she added, "China is still at the basic step of manned space exploration and needs a lot more missions and experiments to gain experience."
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