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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.
(IANS)
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