China's Shenzhou 8 carries the German Science in Microgravity Box (SIMBOX). Credit: DLR
China has lofted an unpiloted Shenzhou 8 spaceship from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia. The plan calls for Shenzhou 8 to dock with the previously-launched Tiangong 1 platform.
After approximately 17 days in space, Shenzhou or “Divine Craft” will carry out a final undock with the craft’s reentry module diving into Earth’s atmosphere and touching down via parachute.
Meanwhile, the German Aerospace Center’s (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) Space Administration has announced that the Shenzhou 8 carries the German Science in Microgravity Box (SIMBOX).
SIMBOX is an experimental facility containing 17 experiments from the fields of biology and medicine, which will be conducted by German researchers together with their Chinese colleagues.
“This is the first time that the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) cooperates with another nation in the use of Shenzhou – the core of China’s human spaceflight program,” according to a DLR press statement.
Fundamental biological and medical questions
The SIMBOX facility — a combination of intelligent incubator and centrifuge — was built at Astrium in Friedrichshafen. Seven German universities have contributed experiments to the project.
In the scope of SIMBOX, plants, nematodes, bacteria and human cancer cells will be exposed to zero gravity and space radiation for nearly three weeks. These experiments will include investigating the crystallization of medically relevant biomacromolecules.
The objective of the experiments is to tackle fundamental biological and medical questions that also play an important role on the Earth. Researchers at the Universities of Erlangen, Hohenheim, Magdeburg, Tübingen, Freiburg, Hamburg and the Charité Berlin are involved in these studies. In addition to the six German experiments, the Universities of Erlangen and Wuhan are carrying out joint German-Chinese experiments.
Once SIMBOX is back on Earth, the space-flown samples will be recovered by helicopter search teams and transported to Beijing for evaluation.
By Leonard David