Zhang Xiaoguang
Chinese astronaut

Zhang Xiaoguang (simplified Chinese: 张晓光; traditional Chinese: 張曉光; pinyin: Zhāng Xiǎoguāng; born May 1966) is a Chinese military pilot and taikonaut selected as part of the Shenzhou program.
Biography
He was born in May 1966 in Jinzhou, to a family of Manchu ethnicity and was a squadron commander in the People's Liberation Army Air Force when he was selected to be an astronaut in 1998. He had accumulated 1000 flight-hours as of 2004. He was selected as part of the backup crew for the Shenzhou 9 mission. In 2013, he was selected to fly Shenzhou 10, the third spaceflight to the first Chinese space station Tiangong 1.
Career
Shenzhou 10 was launched on 11 June 2013, at 09:38 UTC (17:38 local time) on a Long March 2F rocket. It docked to the Tiangong-1 space station, and the crew spent 12 days on board.
Zhang returned to Earth on Wednesday, 26 June 2013 00:07 UTC. Total mission duration was 14 days 14 hours and 29 minutes.
See also
List of Chinese astronauts
Chinese space programme
References
Zhang Xiaoguan at the Encyclopedia Astronautica. Accessed 23 July 2005.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Zhang Xiaoguang” is chinese astronaut. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Zhang, Xiaoguang and Chinese, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zhang Xiaoguang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.