Recovery teams began to search for the rocket's black box and disengaged parts when the rocket and spacecraft separated minutes after the launch of China's second manned space mission in northwest China Wednesday morning.
Nearly 10 minutes after the launch of Shenzhou VI spacecraft at 9:00 AM, the Long March II F rocket carried the capsule into a preset orbit and ended its mission in the flight.
The escape tower, boosters and fairing of the rocket dropped to four sites in a strip ranging about 800 km that covers Badain Jaran Desert of Inner Mongolia in north China and Yulin of the Shaanxi Province in northwest China.
"One of our major tasks is to find the rocket's magnetic recorder," said Zhu Yabin, head of a land emergency rescue team. Magnetic recorder, or "black box", is crucial to retrieve data that telemetry fails to obtain.
The black box fell to Otog Qi in Inner Mongolia with the rocket body when the rocket performed stage one and stage two separation. According to Zhu, the black box will be used for statistics analysis.
Wreckage of the rockets will be exploded on site or sent back to Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center to destroy.
(Xinhua News Agency October 12, 2005)
