The magnetic recorder, or "black box", that disengaged from the Long March II F rocket carrying the Shenzhou VI spacecraft into orbit, has been found here 45 minutes after the blast-off Wednesday morning.
The recorder, crucial to retrieve data that telemetry fails to obtain, will be sent to Beijing for data analysis.
The recorder was first sighted by Lian Hua, an herdswoman in Otog Qi in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which fell on the pasture just 1.5 kilometers away from her home. Xinhua reporters with the recovery team saw at the site that the "black box' was marked with words reading "Government Issue," "Hand over to the Government," and "Monetary Reward Guaranteed."
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.
Zhu Yabin, head of a land emergency rescue team, said that the magnetic recorder has been designed to fall to Otog Qi in Inner Mongolia with the rocket body when the rocket performed stage one and stage two separation.
Wreckage of the rockets will be exploded on site or sent back to Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center to destroy. By press time, three of the four roll boosters have been found, the remaining one is still being searched for.
(Xinhua News Agency October 12, 2005)
