Sunita Williams, the Indian-American astronaut sets a new world record by making the longest flight in space by any woman. She beat her precedent American Shannon Lucid’s (set by Shannon Lucid in 1996 on a mission to the Russian Mir space station) record by 188 days 4 hours at 12:47 CDT IST on June 16 2007. “Early this morning, Mission Specialist Sunita Williams set the record for the longest-duration single spaceflight by a woman,” NASA said in a statement. If all goes well, she will touch her feat on Earth on June 21st, 2007 as a tear in space shuttle Atlantis’s heat shield and computer glitches on international space station have been corrected.
This is yet another feather in her cap and early in February 2007, she broke the record of Kathryn Thornton’s most spacewalk time by a woman. She set a new world record of 29 hours and 17 minutes in four spacewalks. And in April 2007 she ran the first ever marathon in orbit, taking 4 hours 24 minutes.
Sunita started her career in NASA in June 1998 and she was launched on the Space Shuttle Mission STS 116 on December 10, 2006 to join the Expedition 14 crew as a Mission Specialist. Among the personal items she took her to the International Space Station are a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, a small figurine of Ganesha and some samosas. As the decision to bring back Sunita has been taken by NASA, she is no longer expected to break the US single spaceflight record set by Michael Lopez Alegria.
