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Sunita Williams heading back to space again
Saturday June 23, 2012 10:05:17 AM,
Arun Kumar, IANS
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Washington: 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 making final preparations for a July
14 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, according to
a NASA announcement.
She will be a flight engineer on the station's Expedition 32 with
Flight Engineers Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space
Agency and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency. On reaching the space station she will take over as
commander of Expedition 33.
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).
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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