China on the verge of completing its international space station

A model of the Tiangong international space station during an exhibition in Beijing in 2017. AP - Mark Schiefelbein

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The configuration of the Chinese space station is complete.

After the mooring on Monday of its third part, consisting of a laboratory module, the "Heavenly Palace" ("Tiangong" in Mandarin) took its "T" shape on Thursday and is now functional.

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With our correspondent in Beijing,

It is a strange dance in space, slow and articulated, which the taikonauts witnessed behind their porthole this Thursday morning.

At 9:32 a.m., the "Mengtian" laboratory completed its transposition into orbit.

It first detached, then re-docked to the center cabin to take on this T-shape.  

The Chinese international space station is thus made up of three modules: 

, the starting life base launched in April 2021; 

, which completed its transposition in September and which serves both as sleeping and dining area, but also as a research room with its large fridge cabinets.

And then, Mengtian, "dream of heaven" in Mandarin, which is probably the most down-to-earth place, since it is in this second part of the laboratory that research will be carried out ranging from the physics of fluids to the science of materials.  

Trio of clocks 

By entering the new and final module this afternoon,

also recovered cutting-edge scientific equipment, such as these three atomic clocks intended to keep time with unprecedented precision.

On the other hand, the Xuntian optical telescope which was to be mounted inside the module, will finally be placed in the same orbit a few hundred kilometers from the station in 2024, in order to better observe black holes and other exoplanets.

This Chinese modular space station, which will require a total of 11 missions (this is the ninth) for its complete assembly, should accommodate more than 1,000 scientific experiments during its ten-year lifespan, according to

magazine , including the study of microgravity on living tissue.  

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• China

• Space