BEIJING – Chinese astronauts returned a science lesson from the country’s under-construction space station on Thursday.

The conference focused on physics, aiming to illustrate how the weightless environment affects buoyancy, movement of objects and optics.

Students from five cities, including Beijing and the semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong, dotted the astronauts with questions about living conditions in space and were given a virtual tour of the station. The event was also open to the public via a live broadcast.

Wang Yaping, the only woman aboard the station, served as the lead instructor, while Ye Guangfu attended and Commander-in-Chief Zhai Zhigang worked on the camera. Wang had taught a similar lesson aboard one of China’s first experimental stations in 2013.

The three arrived at the station in October for a six-month stay, primarily tasked with preparing the main Tianhe module for the arrival of two additional modules named Mengtian and Wentian before completion by the end of the year. next.

Last month, Wang became the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk when she and Zhai spent six hours outside the module installing equipment and performing tests alongside the robotic service arm of the station.

Their Shenzhou-13 mission is China’s longest since it first sent a human into space in 2003, becoming the third country to do so after Russia and the United States.

The three are the second crew of the permanent station, which when completed will weigh around 66 tonnes, much smaller than the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 450 tonnes.

In addition to installing equipment for the station expansion, the crew assesses living conditions in the Tianhe module and conducts experiments in space medicine and other fields.

The Chinese space program has been barred from the International Space Station, mainly because of concerns by the United States about its close military ties.

China also continued unmanned missions, and its lunar exploration program generated a media buzz this week when its Yutu 2 rover returned photos of what has been described by some as a ‘mysterious hut, but no. was most likely just a certain rock. so.

The rover is the first to be placed on the far side of the moon, little explored, while the Chinese probe Chang’e 5 brought lunar rocks back to Earth for the first time since the 1970s last December. Another Chinese rover, meanwhile, is looking for evidence of life on Mars.

The program has also sparked controversy. In October, China’s Foreign Ministry rejected a report that China had tested a hypersonic missile two months earlier, saying it had simply tested whether a new spacecraft could be reused.

China is also reportedly developing a top secret space plane.