A freighter carrying nearly seven tons of supplies has arrived at China’s Tiangong space station.
The Tianzhou 10 robotic freighter took off on a long march 7 from the Wenchang space launch site on the Chinese island of Hainan on Sunday (May 10) at 8:14 p.m. EDT (0014 GMT and 8:14 a.m. local time on May 11).
The freighter delivered more than 220 items with a total weight of approximately 6.9 tons (6.3 metric tons). according Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.
The cargo transport includes about 620 pounds (280 kilograms) of scientific experiments in fluid physics and other fields, 1,540 pounds (700 kg) of propellant and the last of three new spacewalking spacesuits.
The first two of those suits were delivered on Tianzhou Cargo Flight 9which took off last July and left Tiangong on Wednesday (May 6) to make way for Tianzhou 10.
As its name suggests, Tianzhou 10 is the tenth Tianzhou spacecraft to lift off. These freighters, whose name translates as “heavenly ship,” are disposable and burn in the earth’s atmosphere when their time in orbit is up.
The Tianzhou missions actually predate the Tiangong space station. The first cargo ship of this type was launched in April 2017 and connected in orbit with a prototype space laboratory called Tiangong 2.
China began building the current Tiangong outpost. in April 2021when he raised the central module, known as Tianhe (“Harmony of the Heavens”). The other two Tiangong modules, wentian (“In Search of the Skies”) and mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”), released in July 2022 and October 2022, respectively.
Tiangong usually supports three astronauts at a time. The trio currently living aboard the orbital laboratory are Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang, who arrived on October 31 in the Shenzhen 21 mission.
