By Arun Kumar
IANS
Washington : Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams is packing her bags as she prepares to return home after a six month sojourn in space on board space shuttle Atlantis set for launch next Friday.
Besides personal items she will bring back a science payload when Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Centre, Florida after an 11-day mission, according to US space agency NASA. Williams collected her fifth and final set of blood and urine samples this week for the Nutritional Status Assessment, which measures physiological changes in the human body during space flight.
The samples are stored at minus 80 degrees Celsius in the Minus-Eighty Laboratory Freezer. The experiment will help researchers understand bone metabolism, oxidative damage, vitamin and mineral status and hormonal changes and how they relate to stress, bone and muscle metabolism.
The results should provide a better understanding of what happens physiologically, and when it happens, to crewmembers on long-duration space missions.
But before Williams boards the Atlantis for the flight back home, she will choreograph the second spacewalk June 6 by Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov,as she did the first advising and keeping the space walkers on schedule.
Yurchikhin and Kotov stepped outside the station Wednesday and installed five additional debris protection panels on the conical section of the Zvezda Service Module. They will install 12 additional protection panels on Zvezda June 6.
Meanwhile, Flight Engineer Clayton Anderson who will replace Williams at the space station and other crew members, Commander Rick Sturckow, Pilot Lee Archambault and mission specialists Jim Reilly, Patrick Forrester, Steven Swanson, and John "Danny" Olivas are scheduled to arrive at the Kennedy Space Centre June 4.
NASA will start the launch countdown for space shuttle Atlantis mission on June 5. The countdown includes 27 hours, 32 minutes of built-in hold time leading to a preferred launch time at approximately 7:38 p.m. June 8 (5:08 am IST June 9).
During the 11-day mission, Atlantis' crew will resume construction of the International Space Station, working with the station crew to install the girder-like truss segment, unfold a new set of solar arrays and retract one array on the starboard side of the station.