China's stranded astronauts return from space station

Three Chinese astronauts, whose return to earth was delayed by space debris hitting their vessel last week, have landed in China.

The astronauts were on a six-month rotation at China's space station and originally scheduled to return on November 5, four days after the new crew arrived.

The crew - Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie - departed for home using Shenzhou-21, the craft that had brought a replacement crew.

They touched down at the Dongfeng landing site in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at 4:40pm local time on Friday.

China's Manned Space Engineering Office said there were minor cracks in a window of the return capsule of the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft, most likely caused by impact from space debris.

There are millions of pieces of mostly tiny debris circling the earth at speeds faster than a bullet flies.

They can come from launches and collisions and pose a risk to satellites, space stations and the astronauts who operate outside them.

The delay, while only nine days, was highly unusual for a programme that had run like clockwork and in the past year reached new milestones, with the deployment of astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk and plans to send the first foreign astronaut, from Pakistan, to Tiangong next year.

China's manned space programme now has to deal with another logistical headache - how to get the space station's newly arrived crew home in the event of an emergency.

The Shenzhou-21 spacecraft and its three-person crew arrived at Tiangong two weeks ago.

The Shenzhou-20 will remain in orbit, it said.

China's space program has made steady progress since 2003.

It has built its own space station and has a goal of landing a person on the moon by 2030.

The latest Shenzhou-21 mission brought four mice to the space station to study how they would be affected by weightlessness and confinement.

with Reuters