China's Tiangong-2 space lab blasted off on September 15th, marking another milestone in its increasingly ambitious space program, which envisions a mission to Mars by the end of this decade and its own space station by around 2020. In a cloud of smoke underneath a mid-autumn full moon, Tiangong-2 roared into the air at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gobi desert, on the back of a Long March-2F T2 rocket at 10:04 p.m. Beijing Time.
What is worth mentioning, the operational force measuring system for astronauts designed by professor Song Aiguo and his team from School of Instrument Science & Engineering, Southeast University is providing service for the divine mission. Later, when the Shenzhou-11 manned spacecraft carry two astronauts into space to dock with the lab, the measuring system SEU desinged will be in charge of gathering the operational force information of the astronauts for 30 days before they return to Earth.
4 professors and their graduate students initiated the program since the year 2009. They researched on different types of operational force of astronauts under water and on stimulated space station, like the push-pull effort of opening cabin door, the operational force of pulling the lever, and the pedal force, etc. Based on that, they designed the measuring system for astronauts’ operational force utilized in Tiangong-2. As a small scale, high-precision, reliable and long-lived system, it will provide fundamental experiment statistics for further spcae researches.