Astronaut Sunita
Indian-American astronaut Sunita Willams moved into a room with a view at the new home amid the stars for six months as she arrived at the International Space Station with her six companions on board Space Shuttle Discovery. Sunita Willams is the second woman of Indian origin to reach the orbit after Kalpana Chawla.
At Mission Control in Houston, astronaut Kevin ford said that he did not know what kind of creature comforts were going to be abroad, but he knew it was going to be a room with a view. Discovery astronauts floated abraod the Space Station at 5.24 am IST on Tuesday, the start of a week-long stay to hook up a new power system so new laboratory modules can be added to the complex.
In the seven members group, five of them, whom including Sunita Williams are making their first trips to space, scrambled through Discovery’s hatch and into the welcoming arms of station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and his crew, Mikhail Tyurin of Russia and Thomas Reiter of Germany.
Williams will take the place of flight engineer Reiter of European Space Agency who will return to the Earth with the other six astronauts on December 18. Crew members are pilot William Oefelein and mission specialists John Higginbotham, Nicholas Patrick, Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang and Sunita Williams. This group will be led by commander Mark Polansky.
