The three taikonauts, or Chinese astronauts, aboard the Shenzhou-16 spaceship have entered the China Space Station on Tuesday and met with the Shenzhou-15 crew members living and working there.

The entrance happened at 6:22 p.m. Beijing Time (1022 GMT) when the Shenzhou-15 crew opened the hatch and greeted the new arrivals.

The space get-together kicked off the second in-orbit crew rotation in the China Space Station. The six taikonauts will live together for about five days to complete the handover.

Life in space station 101

The Shenzhou-15 crew will handover the maintenance tools, daily necessities and experiment samples to the new crew, who will carry on with the work for the next five months.

"There are so many things in the space station stored in different places in a classified manner," said Xia Qiaoli, deputy managing designer of the space station. "The old crew need to tell the new one about where each thing is stored."

What's more, the new crew will have to learn about the latest 'how tos' on space station maintenance.

"The real situation in the space station can be slightly different from the training facilities on the ground," Xia told China Media Group (CMG). "The old crew know the most about what's really happening, so they are the best teachers."

Enhanced life support

The China Space Station has been hosting three-person crews for most of its time. Accommodating six taikonauts put more pressure on the station.

"The life support system was designed with this problem in mind," Xia said. "It has a three-person mode and a six-person mode to cope with both situations."

All the taikonauts have to do is switch the life support from "low mode" to "high mode," according to Xia.

The engineers on the ground will also act as "customer service" for the taikonauts and solve new problems on the go. "We always maintain comprehensive communication with the crew and optimize the station based on their feedback," Xia said.

Data safety matters

Each day, the space station will generate big chucks of data on maintenance, taikonaut health and scientific experiments. The data are stored on servers in the station, which are equipped with advanced technology to ensure data integrity.

"We have implemented data backup functions on the servers," said Tian Wei, lead data storage expert at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). "If the main server goes down, the backup servers will take over and make sure the data is still correct."

The servers were designed to be user friendly and taikonauts can easily replace broken parts.

"We also have realtime data redundancy solutions," Tian said in an interview with CMG. "With that, we can correct the data even if it's broken."

(Liu Yuyao contributed to the story.)

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