Sunita Lyn Williams

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Sunita Williams
Sunita Williams
Country: United States
Organization: NASA
selected on June 4, 1998
( 17th NASA Group )
Calls: 2 space flights
Start of the
first space flight:
December 10, 2006
Landing of the
last space flight:
19th November 2012
Time in space: 321d 17h 15min
EVA inserts: 7th
EVA total duration: 50h 40min
Space flights

Sunita "Suni" Williams (* 19th September 1965 as Sunita Pandya in Euclid , Ohio , USA ) is an American astronaut .

education

Williams was born in the small town of Euclid, located directly on Lake Erie , but grew up with her siblings and parents in Needham in east Massachusetts . Her father is a doctor (now retired), comes from India and immigrated to the USA in the early 1960s. Her mother was born in the United States with Slovenian roots.

Williams attended high school in Needham , graduated in 1983, and then went to college. She attended the United States Naval Academy (USNA) in Maryland and received a bachelor's degree in physics in May 1987 .

By graduating from Needham High School, Williams had signed up for the United States Navy and began active service after her USNA time. First she was trained as a marine diver for half a year and then came to Florida . There she received flight instruction for 18 months before completing an advanced course to become a helicopter pilot. She'd wanted to fly jets, but the Navy couldn't provide enough seats for women. Therefore Williams had to switch to the rotary wing aircraft .

Then Williams was transferred to Virginia to the 8th Helicopter Squadron, which has its home base at Naval Air Station Norfolk . With the "Dragon Whales", as the soldiers of the unit call themselves, they undertook missions in the Middle - and in the Red Sea and finally in the Persian Gulf . From there she supported the " Operation Desert Shield " with helicopters of the type CH-46 Sea Knight from the utility "USS Sylvania ". Then she was involved in the US humanitarian operation "Operation Provide Comfort" until June 1992, which was set up in April 1991 to help Kurdish refugees. In September 1992 she commanded a CH-46 unit when the "USS Sylvania" was ordered off the coast of Miami to help the victims of Hurricane Andrew , which had recently devastated Florida.

Williams completed a year-long test pilot training course at the United States Naval Test Pilot School (USNTPS) in Patuxent River (Maryland). Subsequently, she worked from December 1993 in the Navy test department for helicopters, which is also located on the Naval Air Station Patuxent River .

In addition to her military work as a test pilot and security officer, Williams took on further studies. The Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne awarded her a master's degree in industrial engineering in 1995 . Before she was in charge of all flight operations on the " USS Saipan ", she was an instructor for prospective helicopter pilots at the USNTPS.

Williams completed more than 3000 hours of flight with more than 30 types of aircraft.

Astronaut activity

Influenced by her father, Dr. med. Deepak Pandya, and the fact that she grew up with animals, Williams had wanted to be a veterinarian as a child. Over time, her career aspirations changed to become a teacher. The occupation of the space pilot only came into being when she completed the test pilot course at the USNTPS in 1993. One day, the class, the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston ( Texas ), and the space legend John Young held a lesson. That was the trigger for her to apply to NASA. Her first application for the 15th group was rejected, and the second attempt she was finally accepted.

Williams was introduced by NASA as one of 17 mission specialists in June 1998. 101 finalists emerged from a total of 2,618 applicants who met the formal selection criteria. In autumn 1997 they were invited to the JSC for tests, discussions and medical examinations.

In autumn 2000 Williams and the other “penguins” (as the apprentices of the 17th astronaut group called themselves) completed their two-year basic training. Immediately afterwards, NASA sent Williams to Russia for a year to oversee the preparations and flight of the first long-term crew to the International Space Station (ISS) at the “Star City” .

After returning from Moscow, she first learned how to use the ISS robotic arm in Canada , took part in a one and a half week underwater space simulation off the coast of Florida in May 2002, until six months later she was given her first specific task as an astronaut: for a short time During that time, she trained as a flight engineer in the reserve crew for the flight of the ISS Expedition 10 together with her namesake Jeff Williams and the Russian Konstantin Kosejew . When the crews were changed after the Columbia crash , the crew was disbanded in spring 2003.

In early May 2006, NASA announced that Williams would work as a flight engineer on the ISS for around six months from the end of the year. In December 2006 she took off with the shuttle flight STS-116 , replaced the German Thomas Reiter there and initially strengthened the ISS long-term crew Expedition 14 ( Michael López-Alegría and Michail Tjurin ), which had arrived at the station three months earlier. In April 2007, López-Alegría and Tjurin handed over the station supervision to Expedition 15 as planned . Until her return with STS-117 on June 22, 2007, Williams worked with Fyodor Yurtschichin and Oleg Kotow .

During her first space flight, Williams set several records: At 194 days and 18 hours, she was longer than any other woman during a flight in space. Her colleague Shannon Lucid had set the previous record eleven years earlier when she worked 188 days on the Russian space station Mir in 1996 . They also held the record for the largest number of spacewalks a woman (seven) and more than 50 hours, the longest total time, which visited a woman outside a spacecraft.

Williams was assigned to the backup team for ISS expeditions 30 and 31 and then served as flight engineer for ISS expedition 32 . The launch with the Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft took place on July 15, 2012, and the transfer to the ISS on July 17. During Expedition 33 , she was the commander of the ISS from September to November 2012.

On July 9, 2015, NASA introduced Sunita Williams as one of the four test pilots for future commercial spacecraft. Together with Robert Behnken , Eric Boe and Douglas Hurley , she will familiarize herself with the spacecraft CST-100 from Boeing and Dragon V2 from SpaceX. The contract between NASA and Boeing or SpaceX provides for at least one test flight with at least one NASA astronaut on board. The start is currently planned for 2020.

Summary

No. mission function Flight date Flight duration
1 STS-116 / STS-117 Flight engineer 2006/2007 194d 18h ​​02m
2 Soyuz TMA-05M Flight engineer / ISS commander 2012 126d 23h 13m

Private

Sunita Lyn Williams speaking at a press conference in April 2013, Science City, Kolkata

The astronaut is married to Michael Williams. They both met at USNA when they were studying physics. They currently run a long-distance relationship, because while Sunita Williams lives in Houston, her husband works as a police officer in Oregon . The couple have no children.

Williams is in close contact with Slovenia. She last visited this country for a week in May 2013 and gave lectures there. Among other things, she also visited the new cultural center for European space technology KSEVT in Vitanje .

Sunita Williams is a radio amateur with the callsign KD5PLB.

See also

Web links

Commons : Sunita Williams  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Sunita Lyn Williams in the Encyclopedia Astronautica , accessed February 7, 2020.
  2. ^ Future Missions. NASA, accessed January 21, 2012 .
  3. NASA: NASA Selects Astronauts for First US Commercial Spaceflights. In: NASA Press Release 15-148. July 9, 2015, accessed July 10, 2015 .
  4. Marjana Hanc: Vse je mogoče, omejitve si postavljamo sami (German: “Everything is possible, we set limits for ourselves”) in the Slovenian daily Delo , May 20, 2013, p. 32
  5. ^ Radio Contacts with the ISS. ARISS , accessed on August 31, 2014 (English).