UNI

Washington, Jul 9: National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has chosen an Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, nee Pandya, as part of the 14th International Space Station (ISS) crew.

The mission will also have two other NASA astronauts -- Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin -- besides Sunita, as part of the replacement crew for the six-month-long ISS Expedition to be carried out September/October this year.

Sunita will serve as a flight engineer for the mission, according to a NASA release. Michael Lopez-Alegria will be the commander and the station science officer while Mikhail Tyurin will be the flight engineer and Soyuz commander.

Sunita is currently assigned to the Expedition-14 crew. She will join Expedition-14 in progress, to serve as a flight engineer, after travelling to the ISS with the crew aboard STS-116.

Her selection caps the prospects, which began in 2003 when she was selected by the NASA as a backup crew member for one of its missions to the space station orbiting about 240 miles above earth.

Born on September 19, 1965, in Euclid, Ohio, Sunita is married to physicist-turned-US deputy marshall Michael J Williams. She is the daughter of Deepak Pandya, an India-born physician who migrated to United States in the 1960s and now works at a veterans hospital. Her mother Ursaline, a home-maker, is an American of Slavic descent. Her parents, live in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Sunita is the second astronaut of Indian origin after Kalpana Chawla, whose space odyssey had a tragic end on February 1, 2003 when space shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas just before re-entry.

Unlike Chawla, the 41-year-old Sunita says she never wanted to become a pilot, much less an astronaut. Her childhood aim, she says, was to become a veterinarian.