China is about to launch its fourth manned space mission.

It is sending a crew of three, including the nation's first female astronaut, to the orbiting Tiangong space lab, BBC News reported.

Their Shenzhou-9 capsule is set to lift off from the Jiuquan spaceport on the edge of the Gobi desert at 18:37 local time (10:37 GMT).

A Long March 2F rocket will put the astronauts on a path to dock with Tiangong in a couple of days' time.

They will then spend over a week living and working in orbit before returning to Earth.
 

The mission is commanded by Jing Haipeng, who is making his second spaceflight after participating in the Shenzhou-7 outing in 2008 - the mission that included China's first spacewalk.
 

Jing's flight engineers are both first-timers.
 

Liu Yang will look after the medical experiments during the mission.
 

Liu Wang, a People's Liberation Army fighter pilot, has got his chance after spending 14 years in the China National Space Administration's astronaut corps.

Liu Yang, on the other hand, has emerged as China's first woman spacefarer after just two years of training.
 

Her role in the mission will be to run the medical experiments in orbit.
 

Shenzhou-9 follows on from the unmanned Shenzhou-8 venture last year that tested the technologies required to join a capsule to the Tiangong lab.
 

Those manoeuvres went very well and gave Chinese officials the confidence to send up humans.