After spending over nine months at the International Space Station (ISS), Indian-origin NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and her crewmate Butch Wilmore are finally going to return to Earth on Tuesday at 05:57 EDT (i.e. Wednesday 03:27 AM IST). Sunita and Butch had gone to ISS for a week-long space expedition in June 2024, which unknowingly stretched to more than nine months after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft faced technical glitches and returned to Earth without them. Now, after waiting for months not knowing the next course of action, their return is made possible by the launch of SpaceX Crew-10, which took off from Kennedy Space Center on Friday (March 14) night as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The newly arrived crew will take over from the current astronauts, ensuring a seamless transition before Sunita and Butch return back home to Earth.
While much is being written about Sunita Williams’ remarkable space journey which stretched for many months, here’s a look at her tiny Indian village in Gujarat, India and her ancestral home:
Sunita Williams was born on 19 September, 1965, in Euclid, Ohio, U.S to Deepak Pandya and Bonnie Pandya. For the unversed, her father Deepak Pandya was a neuroscientist from Gujarat, India and he had migrated to the USA in 1957 where he met and married Ursuline Bonnie, who was a Slovene-American.
Sunita Williams’ roots in India hail to Jhulasan village in Gujarat, as it was once home to her father and grandparents. The tiny village has a population of roughly 7000 people who are proud of the fact that the astronaut has a connection to their village. In fact, the village has a little library which is named in her grandparents’ memory and her father Deepak Pandya’s ancestral home too. As per reports, Sunita Williams has visited her Jhulasan three times so far– in 1972, 2007 and 2013– after completing space missions successfully. The Indian-origin astronaut had also donated funds to a school in her ancestral village during one of her visits and it still has a picture of her grandparents in its prayer hall.
The people of Jhulasan, Gujarat take great pride in the fact that Sunita Williams belongs to their village. So much so that ever since news of her being stranded in ISS broke in 2024, residents of Jhulasan have been praying for Sunita’s safe return to Earth, keeping an oil lamp burning as a symbol of their hopes, reported the BBC.
