Shenzhou-16 crew completes 1st spacewalk

The Shenzhou-16 crew members on board China's orbiting space station completed their first spacewalk at 9:40 p.m. (Beijing Time) on Thursday, reported Xinhua, quoting the China Manned Space Agency.

Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao collaborated to pull off all set tasks with the assistance of the space station's robotic arm.

Jing and Zhu have since returned to the Wentian lab module safely. During the extravehicular activities lasting about eight hours, they completed several tasks, including the installation and lifting of the support frame for a panoramic camera outside the Tianhe core module, and unlocking and lifting of two panoramic cameras outside the Mengtian lab module.

This was the first time for Jing, who is on his fourth spaceflight, to perform a spacewalk. Zhu has become China's first flight engineer to take part in extravehicular activities.

The Shenzhou-16 crew, as planned, will carry out a large number of space science experiments and complete multiple extravehicular installation tasks of application loads in the future.