Washington, December 10
Carrying among other things a copy of the Bhagavada Gita, a statue of Lord Ganesh and a packet of samosas, Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams soared into space on board space shuttle Discovery toward the International Space Station that would be her new home in the stars for the next six months.
Discovery is scheduled to land on December 21 at Kennedy Space Center. It will bring back to earth German Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency in place of Williams who will spend six months at the International Space station along with a Russian and an American astronaut.
A copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a small statue of Lord Ganesh and a letter written in Hindi by her father Deepak Pandya will be among the few things Williams is carrying into space - besides some samosas in a special container.
Half-Indian half-American, commander Sunita Williams is a graduate of the US Naval Academy. She is one of only six women NASA has put in space since 1965. Her father is an Indian-born doctor and her mother a homemaker of Yugoslav descent.
Williams' mission, the 20th to the space station, will include a complex set of tasks carried out over three spacewalks, including adding a small structural truss to the orbiting laboratory and reconfiguring
The plan is to deliver Indian origin astronaut Sunita Williams to replace German astronaut Thomas Reiter after five and a half months in residence on the space station, which has a rotating crew of three astronauts.
The mission is the 33rd for Discovery and the 117th space shuttle launch since the programme began flying in 1981. With two catastrophic failures in its history, the shuttle fleet is slated to be mothballed after the scheduled completion of ISS construction in 2010.
— IANS
