Washington: Indian-descent American astronaut Sunita Williams, is scheduled to return to Earth Tuesday evening, ending an unusually protracted stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). A spacecraft carrying Williams and three other astronauts will undock from the ISS in a few hours and it will splash down off the coast of the American state of Florida at 5:57 p.m. US Eastern (around 3 a.m. Wednesday in India), according to NASA.

The crew of the spacecraft called Dragon is scheduled to undock from the ISS and close the hatch at 11:15 p.m. US Eastern (8:45 a.m. Tuesday in India). NASA will be live-streaming the Dragon’s return, as part of its joint programme with SpaceX, called NASA’s SpaceX Crew 9 mission. For Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, it will be the start of a journey they were supposed to undertake 10 months ago at the end of their eight-day mission to the space station.

Their earlier schedule was delayed because of technical reasons, NASA has said. Elon Musk, the SpaceX owner whose spacecraft is bringing back Williams and Wilmore, has suggested the two astronauts could have been brought back earlier with his help. “They were left up there for political reasons, which is not good,” Musk said in an interview alongside President Donald Trump on Fox News recently. Williams, who turned 60 in September, is the second India-descent American astronaut of international acclaim. The first was Kalpana Chawla. Just a few years older than Williams, Chawal died in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster.

Sunita Lyn Williams, as she is called, was born in 1965 to a father from Gujarat — Deepak Pandya — and a mother from Slovenia, Ursuline Bonnie Pandya (née Zalokar). Williams made her first trip to the International Space Station in 2006, aboard space shuttle Discovery. 

(IANS)