Space station crew complete mission and return to earth

The Shenzhou XVIII mission crew returned to Earth early on Monday morning, concluding a six-month mission onboard the Tiangong space station.

The Shenzhou XVIII spacecraft's reentry capsule, carrying the three astronauts, mission commander Senior Colonel Ye Guangfu and crew members Lieutenant Colonel Li Cong and Lieutenant Colonel Li Guangsu, touched down at 1:24 am local time at the Dongfeng Landing Site in the middle of the Gobi Desert in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, after a return journey lasting more than nine hours.

After safety checks outside the capsule, ground recovery personnel from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the homeport for all of China's manned spaceflights so far, will open the hatch of the bell-shaped vehicle and conduct a preliminary examination of the astronauts' state of health.

The crew members will then be carried out of the capsule and transferred to medical support vans for further examination.

After these on-site procedures are completed, Ye's team will be flown back to Beijing to undergo a period of quarantine and recuperation programs, which is a standard procedure for Chinese astronauts returning from space.

The Shenzhou XVIII spacecraft departed from the Tiangong station at 4:12 pm Sunday, and flew in a return trajectory before re-entering the atmosphere.

Before setting out on their return trip, Ye's team handed over their work to a new crew, transmitted scientific experimental data back to Earth and sorted and transferred materials between the station and their spaceship.

In the next six months, the Tiangong station will be manned by the Shenzhou XIX trio, headed by Senior Colonel Cai Xuzhe, who arrived on Wednesday afternoon.

Ye and his colleagues, who were the seventh crew to inhabit the Tiangong space station, took over the space station from their peers on the Shenzhou XVII mission in late April.

During their stay, they conducted two spacewalks to mount and fine-tune equipment outside the Tiangong, and carried out numerous scientific and technological tasks.

It has been the second space journey for Ye and the first for his two crew members.

After the flight, Ye has taken over in the Chinese astronauts' group in terms of having spent the longest time in space, with a total of 374 days in orbit, across two space missions.

Before him, Tang Hongbo held the record for the longest in-orbit time of a Chinese astronaut after spending a total of 279 days on the Shenzhou XII and Shenzhou XVII missions.