Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams is all set to return home on June 21 after a record-breaking 194-day space odyssey by a woman with the mission managers giving the green signal. Sunita and six other astronauts, who came on June 10 to fetch her bid farewell to her replacement Clayton Anderson and two Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station (ISS) before the hatches between their spaceship and the station closed at 6.51 pm on Monday (4.21 am IST on Tuesday). "I'm sad to say goodbye, but that means progress is being made and it's time for the International Space Station to grow a little more," Williams told ground control before the astronauts floated into space shuttle Atlantis that would take them home. Undocking at 10.42 am (8.12 pm IST) on Tuesday, Atlantis is scheduled to touchdown at Kennedy Space Centre, Florida at 1.54 pm (11.24 pm IST) on Thursday, US space agency Nasa said. Sunita had set off from here on December 9 on spa...

Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams and I nternational Space Station commander Mike Lopez-Alegria went on a seven-hour, 55-minute space walk in the first of an unprecedented three outings in nine days. The duo returned to their home in space through the Quest airlock at 4.39 am on Thursday after working on the reconfiguration of the station’s power and cooling systems, US space agency Nasa said. They are scheduled to take their second space walk February 4 and the third February 8. While flight engineer Williams — wearing an all-white suit — reconfigured electrical connections, Lopez-Alegria — in the lead in a suit with red stripes — worked at the “rats’ nest”, an area near the base of the Z1 Truss with numerous fluid and electrical connections. As the space walkers stood by, the ground control retracted the starboard radiator of the P6 Truss. After retraction, they installed six cable cinches and two winch bars to secure the radiator and then installed a shroud over it. William...