Another space trip for Sunita Williams

Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams is all set to return to the International Space Station, where she spent a record six months in 2006.

Sunita Williams. pic/afp Photo

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 a busy period that includes two spacewalks, the arrival of Japanese, US commercial and Russian re-supply vehicles, and an increasingly faster pace of scientific research, the US space agency said.