China has sent its second space laboratory into orbit. Beijing is working towards setting up its own manned space station and sending a mission to Mars.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/B. Tang
Advertisement
The Tiangong 2 blasted off "in a cloud of smoke" Thursday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi desert, state news agency Xinhua reported.
The space laboratory, whose name means "Heavenly Palace," was carried into space on top of a Long March rocket. It was set to orbit initially at a height of about 380 kilometers (240 miles) above earth; Xinhua quoted Wu Ping, deputy director of China's manned space engineering office as saying.
Two astronauts were later expected to be transported to the facility and spend 30 days there. They would carry out research projects including those relating to repairing equipment in-orbit, aerospace medicine and atomic space clocks.
Two astronauts are expected to journey to the 'Heavenly Palace'Image: picture alliance/dpa/A. Xin
Ambitious space program
China's first space lab, Tiangong 1, was launched five years ago and officially went out of service earlier this year. In 2003 China conducted its first crewed space mission, becoming the third country after Russia and the United States to do so. Since then, it has staged a space walk and landed a rover on the moon.
China is excluded from the International Space Station. However, Beijing is keen to advance its own space program, with a total of 20 missions planned this year. China intends to eventually land one of its citizens on the moon and back in April announced plans to send a rover to Mars around the year 2020.
China hopes to have a permanent crewed space station in service around 2022.
DW's space exploration retrospective 2015
It was an exciting year in space! A probe made it all the way to Pluto and its moons, and the comet Chury had its great day. The ESA received a new director, and SpaceX taught us all a lesson in perseverance.
Image: Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images
Pluto gets a visit
It took nine years to get there, and this July New Horizons finally made it to the dwarf planet. Ever since, dazzling images of Pluto have been coming back to us. But the probe didn't only bring cameras along. It also has plasma spectrometers to help us get a better sense of what Pluto's all about!
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Nasa/Jhuapl/Swri
Chury gets its Icarus on
The comet 67p/Tschurjumow-Gerasimenko reached the point closest to the sun on its long journey through space. Never before had a robot been in a position as good as this to observe the process of comet-evaporation. But have no fear, Chury survived. It will return to the vicinity of the sun in six years to consummate its Icarus complex.
Following its landing in November 2014, we lost contact with Philae, but then out of nowhere in July this year it got back in touch. From the way it looks, the lander was able to charge its batteries while near the sun. Philae also sent new data to Rosetta, but ever since we haven't heard anything. But researchers haven't given up. Rosetta will keep searching for contact with Philae in 2016.
Image: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team
A cosmological handshake
Researchers at the German Space Agency and the ESA were able to conduct a special experiment this year that led to a handshake between the ISS and Earth. This autumn, the first tele-handshake in history was performed when Justin the DLR Robot in Germany remotely shook hands with a cosmonaut in space - using force feedback.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Balk
Off in search of gravity
This December the LISA Pathfinder began a mission to test the very concept of gravitational wave detection. It is currently heading to where the gravity of the Earth and sun become negligible. That's where its never-before-seen experiments will be conducted. They could help us search for gravitational waves throughout our solar system.
Image: Getty Images/ESA
Is there water or not?
And the answer is a resounding - maybe! In September, NASA announced that gullies had been found on Mars suggesting the Red Planet was wetter than we had ever thought before. But a team of French scientists have since refuted that hypothesis. The gullies could have just as easily been formed by frozen carbon dioxide.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/dpa
What goes up must come down!
SpaceX had some great news to close off its year when the private company successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket. Repeated failures and even an explosion during a transportation flight to ISS left SpaceX with its back to the wall. But then in December the triumph happened. The Falcon 9 took off and landed exactly according to plan.
