Sunita Williams sets new record with 7 hour stroll
Beating previous female spacewalking record of 21 hours created by former American astronaut, Kathryn Thornton, ISS Flight Engineer, Sunita Williams reached the record of spending most-ever hours on spacewalks on Sunday.
Stepping out of the hatch with crewmate Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria to upgrade the International Space Station’s cooling system, Indian-American astronaut, Williams recorded a new record of 22 hours and 27 minutes during her third spacewalk.
During the spacewalk, the two US astronauts aboard the orbiting International Space Station were required to finish reconfiguring the ISS cooling system.
They were required to handle coolant loops filled with poisonous ammonia. A few flakes of ammonia were spotted floating around the station during the spacewalk.
In the airlock at the end of the procedures, they were to conduct some "precautionary decontamination," NASA officials said.
The third spacewalk of the mission scheduled for February 8 will be the most attempted in such span of time by any space station astronauts without the crew of a shuttle also present to assist them.
Sunday's spacewalk was the 79th for station assembly and maintenance and the 51st done without a shuttle present.
At the completion of the third spacewalk from the Quest airlock on Thursday and a Russian spacewalk planned for February 22, Lopez-Alegria will have completed his 10th spacewalk, an astronaut record. Williams will have a total of four, the most ever by a woman.
ISS astronauts are scheduled to conduct 24 spacewalks this year.
Williams, 42, is the second woman of Indian heritage to have been selected by NASA for a space mission after Kalpana Chawla.
Williams graduated from Needham High School, Needham, Massachusetts, 1983; received a bachelor of science degree in physical science from U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 and a master of science degree in Engineering Management from Florida Institute of Technology in 1995.
Selected by NASA in June 1998, she is currently a flight engineer with the Expedition 14 crew on the International Space Station. She was launched on the Space Shuttle mission STS-116, aboard the shuttle Discovery, on 10 December 2006.
Williams performed her first extra-vehicular activity on the eighth day of the STS-116 mission.
