Sunitha Williams – to start her second time space exploration.

Indian- American astronaut, Sunitha Williams would travel to space for the second time in

June 2012. Born of Gujarathi parents,Deepak Pandya-neuroanatomist and slovac

mother Bonny Pandya in Euclid, Ohio, but considers Needham,Massachusets where her

parents live as her home town.

Sunitha Williams, 44, would take over as station commander at the International space

station that was her home in the sky from December 9, 2006 to June 22, 2007.

Williams would be joined by flight engineers Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and

Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide on Soyuz 31 flight to the space station in June2012.

After launching aboard Discovery, Williams arranged to donate her pony tail to Locks of Love.Fellow astronaut Joan Higginbotham cut her hair aboard the International Space Station and the Discovery crew brought the pony tail back to Earth.

Among the personal items Williams took with her on her last trip were a copy of the Bhagavadgita, a small figurine of Ganesha and some samosas. The question is what would she carry this time around.

ISRO's , PSLV C-15 launched successfully.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India's space agency on Monday, Jul 12,2010, successfully launched the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket, into orbit remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2B and four other satellites.

The main cargo, Cartosat-2B weighs 694 kg. Another satellite the Alsat-2A, the Algerian remote sensing satellite weighs 116 kg. It also include two nano Satellites- NLS 6.1, AISSAT-1 weighing 6.5 kg (built by the University of Toronto, Canada) and one kg NLS 6.2 TISAT built by University of Applied sciences, Switzerland. The fifth other is STUDSAT, a pico satellite weighing less than one kg, built jointly by students of seven engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

At the end of an over 51-hour countdown, the 44.4 metre-tall four-stage PSLV-C-15, costing Rs 260 crore, blasted off from a launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre with ignition of the core first stage and placed the satellites in orbit one after the other.

The rocket first released Cartosat-2B twenty minutes after the blast off. It was followed by Alsat-2A and the three small satellites.

ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan said that he is extremely happy to say that PSLV C-15 was a successful fligt. He added that all the satellites were injected precisely.