Sunita Willams to serve as flight engineer on NASA's Expedition 15

Washington, Oct 20 (UNI) Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams will serve as a flight engineer on NASA's Expedition 15.

Sunita will fly to the station on STS-116 in December. Sunita received her commission as an Ensign in the United States Navy from the United States Naval Academy in May 1987. Sunita is the second American woman astronaut with Indian roots, after Kalpana Chawla, to be selected for a space mission by NASA.

During the 15th long duration mission to the space, which calls for the shuttle to dock with the space station in March 2007 to begin its six-month cycle, crew members will install the third port truss segment, the second starboard truss segment and the third set of solar arrays and batteries, according to a NASA release here.

NASA has named astronauts Clayton Anderson and Daniel Taniand while Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, named Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov for the mission.

Sunita will work as flight engineer till Anderson reaches the station aboard space shuttle Endeavour's STS-118 mission, targeted for launch in June 2007. He will return on shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-120. That flight will carry his replacement, Tani, to the station. Tani will return on shuttle mission STS-122, targeted for October 2007.

Yurchikhin will command Expedition 15 and Kotov will serve as station flight engineer and Soyuz commander. Yurchikhin and Kotov will fly to the complex aboard a Soyuz spacecraft scheduled to launch in March 2007.

Anderson was selected to train as an astronaut in 1998 after a technical career in mission operations at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas. He managed the Emergency Operations Center at Johnson for several years before becoming an astronaut.

Tani was selected as an astronaut in 1996. His first spaceflight was aboard Endeavour in 2001. During that flight, he performed a four-hour spacewalk.

Yurchikhin visited the space station aboard Atlantis in 2002. He is qualified as a mechanical engineer and has a doctorate in economics. Before he was selected as a cosmonaut, Yurchikhin served as a Russian flight controller and lead engineer for several missions.

Kotov was selected as a cosmonaut in 1996 and has trained for Soyuz, Mir and space station missions. He is a graduate of the Kirov MedicalAcademy in Russia.

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