NASA astronaut Sunita Williams said that she is planning to come to India soon and will meet ISRO’s team during her visit.
Williams said during NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 post-flight news conference that whenever his spacecraft passed by the Himalayas during his nine-month stay in space, he found India ‘amazing’.
He said, “I hope and I am confident that I will go back to my father’s country and meet people and get excited about the Indian astronauts going on ISRO Mission.”
Sunita Williams’ mother Ursuline Boney Pandya (Birth Zalokar) is of Slovenian-American origin, while her father Deepak Pandya is from Gujarat.
Williams said that she would like to share her experience in space with ISRO, and said that it is very good that India has taken forward its step in the space field as a democracy.
He said, “It’s great – there will be a hometown of his own who will be able to talk about how amazing the international space station is from his perspective.”
He said, “I hope that I will be able to meet him at some time and we will be able to share our experiences with more and more people in India, because it is a great country, another amazing democracy that is trying to make its place in space countries and I would like to be a part of it and help them.”
When asked if she was planning to take her party along in her upcoming visit to India, she gave positive reply and jokingly said that the members of the party would be served spicy food.
He said, “Absolutely! May you get out a little, but no matter – we will feed you spicy food, we will be good.”
Williams said that she could see India’s geographical construction, when the terrain collided and the Himalayas were formed and India was formed with its influence.
He said, “India is amazing. Whenever we went over the Himalayas, we got some incredible pictures of the Himalayas – it is really amazing. As I have mentioned earlier, it’s like a wave. Obviously, when the plates collided and then when it came to India. It has many colors.”
Williams talked about India’s diversity from space to the Himalayas, from the different culture of the East to the fleet of the west.
He said, “I think when you come from the east, go to areas like Gujarat and Mumbai, the fishing fleet on the banks there indicates you that we have come! In the whole of India.”
Williams said that the country looks like a network of lights, in which the major cities are the brightest, and this light is decreasing towards small cities.
He said, “I think it felt that it is a network of lights coming from big cities to small cities, it was incredible to see at night and day time. It was certainly highlighted by the Himalayas which is incredible as a forearm in India.”
NASA Crew-9 astronaut Sunita Williams, Nick Hague, Buch Wilmore and Russian astronaut Alexander Gorbunov breathed on Earth for the first time after nine months after the successful launch of SpaceX’s dragon capsule.
According to CNN report, the problems caused by Boeing’s Starlineer spacecraft were delayed, which came out during the testing flight conducted by Buch Wilmore and Sunita Williams in summer last year, causing the astronaut pair to stay in space for nine months instead of a week.
At that time ISRO expressed his desire to cooperate with Williams in future space missions.
It said, “When India is working towards making India a developed country under the leadership of Honorable Prime Minister Modi, we want to use your expertise in space exploration.”