China's Mengtian space lab module, the third major component of the nation's Tiangong space station, was launched on Oct 31, a key step toward completing the in-orbit assembly of Tiangong.
 
The Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in Harbin, the capital city of China's northernmost Heilongjiang province, has contributed to several technologies used in the building of the Mengtian space lab module.
 
The small manipulator target adapter applied in Mengtian was jointly developed by academician Liu Hong and Professor Xie Zongwu of HIT's School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, as well as the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
 
The adapter is used to realize the free crawling and load operation of the small robotic arm on the Mengtian experimental cabin.
 
Meanwhile, the marker light installed on the Mengtian experimental cabin for visual navigation was developed by associate researcher Zhu Bing, Professor Li Jinzong and Engineer Li Dongdong from the Institute of Image Information Technology and Engineering of the School of Telecommunications of HIT.
 
The marker light meets the design requirements of being light weight, energy-efficient, and small in size. The uniform light property of the marker light enables high-precision position characterization in orbit, which will play a role in subsequent space exploration and applications.
 
What’s more, the teams of Professor Zhang Guangyu and Professor Li Longqiu from HIT's School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering have developed a variable combined super-inertia, low friction and variable temperature field indexing mechanism performance ground simulation test system to help overcome problems related to large load mass, large inertia, and high ground simulation friction of the space station indexing mechanism.
 
The reliability and stability of the indexing mechanism in the space station will help the Mengtian experimental module to be indexed.