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Sunita Williams takes off on her second space odyssey
Sunday July 15, 2012 10:32:57 AM,
Arun Kumar,
IANS
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Related Article |
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 Sunita Williams heading back to space again
Indian-American astronaut Sunita
Williams is all set to return to to the International Space
Station, where she spent a record six months in 2006. Daughter of
an Indian American father from Gujarat and a Slovenian mother,
Williams is currently ma »
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Washington: Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, who holds the record of
the longest space flight (195 days) for a woman, has taken off on
her second space odyssey to the International Space Station.
The Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft carrying Williams, 46, Flight
Engineers Yuri Malenchenko of Russia and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan,
blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 8.40 am
Sunday (8.10 am India Time), NASA said.
They will dock to the Rassvet module Tuesday at 12:52 a.m. to join
Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Joe Acaba and
Sergei Revin at the space station. Williams will take over as
Commander when the old team returns.
Daughter of an Indian American father from Gujarat and a Slovenian
mother, Williams and her colleagues will be aboard the station
during an exceptionally busy period that includes two spacewalks,
the arrival of Japanese, US commercial and Russian resupply
vehicles, and an increasingly faster pace of scientific research,
the US space agency said.
Williams is the second woman of Indian heritage to have been
selected by NASA for a space mission after Kalpana Chawla and the
second astronaut of Slovenian heritage after Ronald M. Sega.
She holds three records for female space travellers: longest
spaceflight (195 days), number of spacewalks (four), and total
time spent on spacewalks (29 hours and 17 minutes) during her
first space journey in 2006.
A 1987 graduate of the US Naval Academy, Williams served in
various roles as a Navy officer before being selected as an
astronaut candidate by NASA in 1998. She received a master's
degree from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1995.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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