Less than a day after venturing into the void of space on China's first spacewalk, commander Zhai Zhigang and his team of astronauts are preparing to return to Earth Sunday with a landing in the steppes of northern China.

Touchdown in Inner Mongolia is scheduled for about 0940 GMT (5:40 a.m. EDT), or shortly before sunset Sunday at the landing site, according to the state-owned Xinhua news agency.

The landing will end a three-day adventure in space that included China's first spacewalk.

Recovery crews are on standby in the landing zone, ready to help the crew remove their entry suits and exit the spacecraft.

Shenzhou should jettison its orbital module, a habitation compartment at the forward end of the ship, about 50 minutes before the scheduled landing. Braking rockets on the propulsion module are expected to ignite moments later to slow the spacecraft enough to fall from its 205-mile-high orbit.

The entry module containing the three-man crew will separate from the propulsion module before encountering the outer fringes of Earth's atmosphere.

Earlier Shenzhou missions launched and landed in the morning, but the orbit achieved after Shenzhou 7's night launch only allows re-entry opportunities over China in the evening, local time.

Zhai, a 41-year-old military pilot, closed himself inside a Chinese Feitian spacesuit and floated through the hatch of Shenzhou 7's orbital module Saturday. The excursion lasted about 14 minutes and made China the third nation to accomplish such a feat.

Zhai was briefly joined by astronaut Liu Boming, who wore a Russian Orlan spacesuit and emerged halfway through the hatch to hand Zhai a Chinese flag and help retrieve an experiment package mounted outside the ship.

Jing Haipeng, Shenzhou 7's third crew member, stayed inside the craft's entry module to monitor the spacewalk.

Shenzhou 7 deployed a small monitoring satellite about two hours after the spacewalk's conclusion. The spacecraft, weighing less than 90 pounds, was designed to capture images of Shenzhou 7 as it flew away.

The three astronauts launched Thursday from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China.