Three Chinese astronauts of Shenzhou 14 successfully enters the Tiangong Space Station

The Shenzhou 14 spacecraft arrived at Tiangong's "Tianhe" core module about 7 hours after lifting off at Jiuquan Spaceport.

Shenzhou-14 taikonauts Cai Xuzhe, Chen Dong and Liu Yang (from left) the third crew of China's Space Station entered the Tianhe core module on June 5.

China's three-person Shenzhou 14 mission arrived at Tianhe, the core module of the under-construction Tiangong, early Sunday morning (June 5), about six hours and 58 minutes after lifting off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. The capsule docked at the Radial Earth-facing port of Tianhe at 5:42 a.m. EDT (0942 GMT), according to a Weibo post from the China Manned Space Agency.

The three Shenzhou 14 astronauts — commander Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe — are expected to spend about six months aboard the 54-foot-long (16.6 meters) Tianhe ("Harmony of the Heavens"), which launched to low Earth orbit in April 2021.

The trio is slated to carry out the verification of big and small robotic arms, spacewalks, and the construction of payload outside the cabin, the sources learned from the Shenzhou spacecraft developer with the state-owned aerospace contractor China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC)

The Shenzhou-14 crew's stay in orbit will see nine modifications of the space station combination, with five rendezvous and dockings, three separations and two module relocations, which makes it the most complicated in-orbit mission to date, Guo Zhi, a senior engineer with the Xi'an Satellite Control Center,

The center vowed to continue to update its computing system, optimize its orbit calculation mode, and combining ground station, space-borne monitoring technology as well as data from China's home-developed BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) to ensure the successful execution of the