The space lab of <a href="">China Cube vacuum space bags Factory</a> Tiangong-2 will dock with the Shenzhou-11 manned spacecraft later this year and the country's first cargo space ship Tianzhou-1 in 2017, state-run Xinhua quoted experts as saying.
Scientific apparatus carried by China's experimental space lab Tiangong-2 has began.Tiangong-2 is a Chinese space laboratory and part of the Project 921-2 space station programme. Beijing: Scientific apparatus carried by China's experimental space lab Tiangong-2 has began operating after being on standby mode for nearly seven days since it entered its preset orbit.Nearly 100 ground operators, including staff from the operation and application centre, payload developers and subscribers to related applications, are coordinating in the operation.In comparison, Tiangong-2 hosts many more experiments and is taken as China's first space lab "in the strict sense", the Xinhua report said. (Representational image) Tiangong-2 is a Chinese space laboratory and part of the Project 921-2 space station programme which was launched on September 15.Its predecessor Tiangong-1, which was launched in 2011 and docked with the Shenzhou-8, Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10 spaceships, was mainly used to verify technology involved in space docking and serve as a simple platform for a number of scientific experiments, said Wu Ping deputy director of China's manned space engineering office.

Also piggybacking on the Tiangong-2 launch is a robotic arm that can be used for on-orbit repairs, and a micro satellite that will orbit close to the space lab and snap on to Tiangong-2 and the visiting Shenzhou-11 spacecraft crew. It was launched on September 15.."Most of the scientific payload will be put into operation in the next 30 hours," Guo Lili, director with the payload operation and application at the Technology and Engineering Centre for Space Utilisation under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said.Its payloads include POLAR, a collaboration between Swiss, Polish and Chinese institutions to study gamma ray bursts, and a cold atomic space clock, which scientists say only loses one second in about 30 million years.Tiangong-2 is a Chinese space laboratory and part of the Project 921-2 space station programme which was launched on September 15