The Shenzhou XVIII mission crew returned to Earth early on Monday morning, concluding a six-month mission onboard the Tiangong space station.
am local time at the Dongfeng Landing Site in the middle of the Gobi Desert in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, after a return journey lasting more than nine hours.
Ye and his colleagues, who were the seventh crew to inhabit the Tiangong space station, took over the space station from their peers on the Shenzhou XVII mission in late April.
During their stay, they conducted two spacewalks to mount and fine-tune equipment outside the Tiangong, and carried out numerous scientific and technological tasks.
It has been the second space journey for Ye and the first for his two crew members.
After the flight, Ye has taken over in the Chinese astronauts' group in terms of having spent the longest time in space, with a total of 374 days in orbit, across two space missions.