Ahmedabad: September 20, 2007 - Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams has arrived at Ahmedabad and is scheduled to spend most of her time in Gujarat in the native state of her father Deepak Pandva. She may also visit Sabarmati Ashram in the State. Her total schedule in India is for about a week.

The flight engineer is the daughter of a Slovenian American mother and an Indian father from Gujarat. It's because of her Indian origins that the maiden voyage to space on board Discovery attracted considerable interest in India.
Sunita's mission was to undertake space walks and operate the space shuttle's robotic arm, both highly specialised and delicate tasks. More significantly she had to stay on for nearly six months.

Sunita spent that time on the International Space Station rewiring it for further expansion.

For the 42-year-old who had begun as a helicopter pilot this was undoubtedly the high point of her career so far.

But Williams had always dreamt of reaching the stars.

''When she was growing up, President Kennedy had a big push for space travel. We watched this on TV and she was very tuned to all that. And it was probably something she had at the back of her mind,'' said Bonnie Pandya, Sunita Williams' mother.

Apart from setting the record for the longest stay by a woman in space, Sunita created more milestones- a world record for females with four spacewalks totaling 29 hours and 17 minutes.

''It's really inspiring, for me personally,'' said a local.

Inspiration from Kalpana

The family says she drew inspiration from Kalpana Chawla while both worked together at NASA.

''She learnt a lot from her (Kalpana). Just being with her was great fun. Kalpana Chawla had a lot of different interests. One of the interests was in Indian music. And they both used to listen to Indian classical music together,'' said Deepak Pandya, Sunita Williams' father.