By R Anil Kumar
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Sunita Williams plans to visit India to share her space exploration experiences. The NASA astronaut expressed her admiration for India’s beauty from space
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‘I’m going to my father’s home country’: Sunita Williams to visit India and meet ISRO team
Washington DC. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams has confirmed that she will visit her “father’s home country” India and share experiences about space exploration with people here.
Sunita Williams was addressing the first press conference along with fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore since their return to Earth as part of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission – having been stranded in space for over nine months.
NASA astronaut Sunita Williams has announced her plans to visit India soon, expressing excitement about meeting the Indian Space Research Organisation team during her trip.
Speaking at NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 Post-Flight News Conference, Williams shared how mesmerising she found India from space, particularly the Himalayas, during her extended nine-month mission.
“I hope and I think for sure I’m going to be going back to my father’s home country and visiting with people and getting excited about the Indian astronauts who’s going up on the ISRO mission coming up,” she said.
Sunita’s father, Deepak Pandya, hails from Gujarat, while her mother, Ursuline Bonnie Pandya (nee Zalokar), is of Slovenian-American descent.
The astronaut expressed her eagerness to share her experiences with ISRO and praised India’s growing presence in space exploration.
When asked how India looked from space when she was in the International Space Station and on the possibility of her collaborating with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on space exploration, the 59-year-old NASA astronaut replied, “India is amazing. Every time we went over the Himalayas, and I will tell you, Butch got some incredible pictures of the Himalayas. Just amazing.”
“And you can see, like I’ve described it before, just like this ripple that happened, obviously when the plates collided, and then as it flows down into India. It’s many, many colours,” she said.
“I think, when you come from the east, going into like Gujarat and Mumbai, the fishing fleet that’s off the coast there gives you a little bit of a beacon that here we come, and then all throughout India, I think the impression I had was it was just like this network of lights from the bigger cities going down through the smaller cities. Just incredible to look at night as well as during the day, highlighted, of course, by the Himalayas, which is just incredible as a forefront going down into India,” she said.
Sunita Williams added, “I hope, and I think for sure, I am gonna be going back to my father’s home country and visiting with people and getting excited about the first, or not the first, but the Indian national who is going up on the Axiom Mission coming up, pretty awesome,” she said.
Sunita Williams on Axiom Mission 4
The Indian-origin NASA astronaut also referred to the Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) commercial astronaut mission to the International Space Station that will include Mission Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India.
Lucknow-born Shukla will be India’s second astronaut after former Indian Air Force officer Rakesh Sharma to go to space since 1984.
“They’ll have a hometown hero there of their own that will be able to talk about how wonderful the International Space Station is from his perspective. But I hope I can meet up at some point in time, and we can share our experiences with as many people in India as possible, because it’s a great country, another wonderful democracy that’s trying to put its foot in the space countries, and we’d love to be part of that and help them along,” Sunita Williams said.
Sunita Williams’s Indian connection
Sunita’s father Deepak Pandya was born in Gujarat and came to the US in 1958 where he did his internship and residency training in Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.
Sunita was born in Ohio to Deepak and Ursuline Bonnie Pandya.
Sunita Williams plans to take her crew members on trip to India
Butch Wilmore, who was sitting right next to Williams, asked her, “Do you plan to take your crew members on that trip with you?”
“Absolutely,” replied Sunita.
“You might stick out a little bit but that’s okay. We’ll get you all primed with some spicy food, will be good,” she added.
PM Modi’s message to Sunita Williams
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had welcomed Sunita and her fellow Crew-9 members as they returned to Earth after the prolonged mission to the International Space Station, saying their unwavering determination will forever inspire millions.
“Welcome back, Crew9! The Earth missed you,” Modi said in a post on X.
NASA astronauts Sunita, Nick Hague and Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, returned to Earth March 18 onboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which splashed down in the sea off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida.
For Sunita and Wilmore, test pilots for Boeing’s new Starliner capsule, an eight-day mission stretched to more than nine months as a series of helium leaks and thruster failures deemed their spacecraft unsafe. The spacecraft returned without them in September.
