A day after reaching her new home, 250 miles above the earth, Sunita Williams is quite excited about her first space walk.
"She told me in an e-mail message on Wednesday night that she is fine, despite a little stomach problems. She is getting used to her routine in her new space home, where she will be staying for the next six months," her father Deepak Pandya told rediff.com from his home in Hawaii.
"I just visited my new quarters and I am looking forward to my first space walk this week," Pandya quoted his daughter as saying in the message he received on Tuesday.
"She sent us a photo that shows her in a cabin with all kinds of machinery around. She looked happy, healthy and very excited and that is all that counts," Pandya said
Williams, known as Suni by her friends and colleagues, had a little chat with her parents from the cockpit of Discovery minutes before her liftoff last week, and in those few minutes she told them not to worry about her as she was on her way.
"She said namaste to me and she said goodbye. Sunita told us not to worry. She said she is all very safe and that she was on her way ," he said, quoting her. "You know she was comforting us as we became a little bit emotional at the last moment."
Although Pandya, who teaches neuroscience in Harvard and Boston University, and his wife Bonnie, a homemaker, have always encouraged their daughter to fulfil her dreams to become an astronaut, they turned a bit emotional on the eve of their daughter's first space odyssey on STS 116 that they watched from the Kennedy Space Center.
"We said 'God bless you'. Both her grandmothers are no more and I told her that they both would be watching her from the sky. She had a lot of respect for them," Pandya said.
The International Space Station grew Tuesday when the STS-116 crew installed the P5 integrated truss segment.
The construction work was performed by STS-116 spacewalkers Bob Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang and robot arm operators Joan Higginbotham and Sunita Williams.
Two more spacewalks are scheduled during STS-116's stay to reconfigure and redistribute power generated by the station's solar arrays.
The spacewalks are set for Thursday and Saturday. Williams is set to do the spacewalk on Saturday.
Williams, who arrived at the station with the mission, replaced European Space Agency Astronaut Thomas Reiter on the Expedition 14 crew at midnight Tuesday.
She will remain a member of Expedition 14 until Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin are relieved by Expedition March 15, 2007.
