Although every task she will be assigned at the space station daily or even hourly is determined in advance, Williams does not think see her space sojourn as drudgery.
"I don't think I am going to get bored. Whenever you have a free moment, you can always look out of the window and take pictures.
There are programs that tell you whenever you are flying over your home town and if you can get a good shot. There is so much to do," she said.
"Looking out the window, looking at the earth, thinking of the universe, I think it is going to be an amazing experience. We have a telephone and an Internet connection and can call home. We can always check back on the people at home. I think it's going to be a whole lot of fun to involve many people as on earth during space flight," she had said during an earlier interview with this reporter.
Williams, who is known to her colleagues simply as Suni, is taking a few mementos, including photos of her husband Michael J Williams and her parents as well as Gorby, her dog who is named after Mikhail Gorbachev.
"I think he [Gorby] knows that life is going to change for him for sometime at least. I think he understands that," Williams, who is very attached to her dog, said. "I am really going to miss him."
Williams, who has access to a digital library in space, is also taking a hard copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey with her along with another book given to her by her dad, Deepak Pandya, who teaches neuroscience at Harvard.
Image: The seven astronauts who will be onboard Space Shuttle Discovery are, front row (from left), William Oefelein, pilot; Joan Higginbotham, mission specialist; and Mark L. Polansky, commander. Back row (from left) are Robert Curbeam, Nicholas Patrick, Sunita Williams and the European Space Agency's Christer Fuglesang, all mission specialists. The crewmembers are attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits.
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