The Hindu : Front Page : Sunita is ‘Person of the Week’

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Sunday, Jun 24, 2007
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Sunita is ‘Person of the Week’

— Photo: AP

Safe landing: In this image from NASA TV, Space Shuttle Atlantis lands at Edwards Air Force Base, California early on Saturday.

NEW YORK: Hours after she returned to the earth onboard shuttle Atlantis after a record 195-day stay in space, Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams was chosen ‘Person of the Week’ by a leading U.S. television network.

The shuttle touched down safely at the Edwards Air Force Base in California on Friday after poor weather at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral forced mission managers to skip three landing attempts there.

“Welcome back and congratulations on a great mission,” NASA mission control told Sunita and six other members of the crew soon after the shuttle landed.

After the landing, 41-year-old Sunita was chosen ‘Person of the Week’ by the ABC Television Network. In December, the network noted, she had her long hair cut so she could donate her locks to help those who lost their hair while fighting an illness.

Sunita also set the world record for a female astronaut on spacewalks, totalling 29 hours and 17 minutes, ABC said. She proved that she could not only walk in space but also run. For, when her sister Dina Pandya ran the Boston Marathon on April 16, she ran her own marathon in space using a treadmill suspended by gyroscopes to minimise any impact of pounding feet on the space station.

“I was thinking about her. If she’s going through this, I can do it,” Dina said.

Despite her success in space, Sunita said she did not immediately get her dream job in flight. “I tell little girls about the story. I started flight school when Top Gun [a Tom Cruise movie] came out, so of course everybody wa nted to fly jets,” she told ABC News earlier this week. “That was the cool thing to do, and I put that down as my first choice but got helicopters.”

But in the end it worked out. “You just sort of take what you get,” she said. “Maybe, you don’t get the first thing that you want. If you are good at what you do and you try hard, some things sort of fall into place.”

After flying helicopters for the Navy during the first Gulf War, Commander Sunita Williams was selected to train as an astronaut.

As the Atlantis finished its 14-day trip, Sunita had an international cheering squad awaiting her safe return.

Sunita, who has a Slovenian mother and an Indian father, had hundreds of people praying in India for her safe return, the network noted. “In my hometown, for seven days everyone is praying,” her father Deepak Pandya said. Soon after the touchdown of the shuttle, he said in Houston: “I will not call her Miss Universe. I will call her India’s daughter.” The entire family would be visiting India as soon as possible, he added.

Sunita crossed the milestone for the longest uninterrupted stay by a woman in space on Saturday last, surpassing the 188-day, four-hour mark set by U.S. astronaut Shannon Lucid in 1996 on a mission to the Russian Mir space station.

She had set off from Cape Canaveral on December 9 last on shuttle Discovery for what was to become the longest space journey by a woman. During her stay at the space station, she worked with experiments across a wide variety of fields, including human life sciences, physical sciences and earth observation as well as education and technology demonstrations. Some of these experiments gave scientists critical insight into the effects of weightlessness on human bodies while others showed ways to prevent effects already known like muscle and bone loss.

Sunita collected and stored her blood while in space to add to an ongoing study on nutrition, another key element of living in space for long stretches of time. — PTI

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