The Shenzhou-18 mission returns to Earth after six months on the space station

Beijing. Three Chinese crew members of the Shenzhou-18 mission returned to Earth yesterday after a six-month stay at China’s Tiangong space station, as part of that country’s efforts to be a world leader in exploration in that environment.

A parachute slowed his capsule’s nighttime descent to a remote landing zone in China’s Inner Mongolia region. The crew emerged after touching down at 1:24 a.m., as a Chinese national flag pinned to the ground near the capsule fluttered in the wind.

The members will be in medical quarantine and will undergo comprehensive medical examinations.

In recent years, the Chinese space program has transported rocks from the Moon and also taken a rover to Mars. Its goal is to put a person on the Moon in 2030, which would make it the second nation, after the United States, to do so.

The space station members returned after welcoming a new crew of three last week for a new six-month mission.

Shenzhou-18 returned with 34.6 kilograms of experimental samples from the space station, covering microorganisms, alloy materials and nanomaterials difficult to prepare on Earth.

This team, made up of one woman and two men, will carry out experiments, spacewalks and install equipment to protect the station from space debris.

A space agency official said in April that Tiangong had maneuvered several times to avoid debris and had partially lost power when its solar wing’s power cables were hit by debris fragments, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

China is one of the countries responsible for this trash, which reportedly included the destruction of a rocket module last August, during the launch of the first 18 satellites for a global Internet service similar to Starlink, the satellite network still in expansion operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Tiangong, which means Heavenly Palace, was completed two years ago and orbits the Earth.

So far only Chinese astronauts have gone to the space station, although an agency spokesperson said last week that China is in talks to select and train crew from other nations to join the missions, Xinhua reported.

Astronauts from several countries have traveled to the International Space Station, but China is blocked from that program, mainly due to US concerns about military involvement. Beijing last month presented a plan to become a leader in space scientific research by 2050, in conjunction with its advances in space exploration.