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fter Kalpana Chawla, who became a household name in India five years
ago by becoming the first Indian American astronaut to go into space,
this year it was the turn of Indian origin Sunita Williams to prove
that Indian women are not less than women of any other country.
Mission Specialist Sunita Williams became the second woman of Indian
origin to touch the stars. She flew into the space on shuttle Discovery
in the month of December, after being selected by NASA as a member
of the backup crew for one of its space missions.
Sunita will stay at the ISS for another six months. She replaces
Flight Engineer Thomas Reiter, who will return to Earth with STS-116.
Sunita will stay back as she takes his place as part of the three-person
crew at the space lab.
Sunita will be involved in the conduct of three spacewalks to install
the P5 structure and to reconfigure and redistribute power generated
by the station.
The combined shuttle and station crews face a daunting task of
rewiring the space station without interrupting life-support and
other critical systems.
The shuttle crew will also install a new segment to the station's
external structural truss.
Tally-ho on the new home," sang out Suni, as navy commander
Sunita Williams is affectionately called by her friends, as the
shuttle crew first caught sight of the station. "It's beautiful.
The solar arrays are glowing."
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