Arun Kumar
WASHINGTON, DC: Carrying among other things a copy of the Bhagavad 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 will be her new home for six months.
Discovery, with six crew, took off at 8:47:35 pm Saturday (7:17: 35 am IST on Sunday) on a column of fire that briefly dispelled the darkness over the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Strong winds had put in doubt NASA's first night launch since the Columbia disaster in 2003 that killed another Indian American astronaut Kalpana Chawla, but the gusts subsided about an hour before.
Bad weather postponed an initial launch attempt Thursday.
In addition to Sunita Williams and Polansky, the crew includes Sweden's first astronaut, Christer Fuglesang, pilot William Oefelein, flight engineer Robert Curbeam, and mission specialists Nicholas Patrick, and Joan Higginbotham.
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 station's electrical system to begin drawing power from solar panels added on the last mission.
The astronauts will also move an older set of solar arrays out of the way of the new arrays, which will turn on their axis like a paddlewheel as the station follows its orbital path.
The plan is to deliver 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.
