First Chinese Woman in Space, Mrs Liu Yang, visits CDF
Mrs Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman astronaut in space, and part of the Shenzhou 9 mission to rendezvous and dock with the Tiangong 1 space module, visited the CDF on 5 October 2012 as part of a delegation from the China Manned Space Agency (CMSEO).
The delegation, which was led by Mr Wang Zhaoyao, CMSEO Director General, visited the CDF as part of their visit to ESA which included ESTEC in Noordwijk and Headquarters in Paris.
Briefed on the role of the CDF by Massimo Bandecchi (Head of CDF), the delegation were eager to learn more about the advantages of concurrent engineering and were very interested in the fact that the CDF model had been utilised by so many other agencies, industries and academia across Europe.
The CMSEO delegation participated in a brief simulation of a study iteration; the participants were interested in the ability of the CDF model to utilise tools used by specific domain experts to design their subsystems and be able to give that information to other users in a format that was common to all.