Daughter of an Indian-American father from Gujarat and a Slovenian mother, Williams is the second woman of Indian origin to have been selected by NASA for a space mission after Kalpana Chawla and the second astronaut of Slovenian heritage after Ronald M. Sega.
Williams, Aki Hoshide of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko spent 125 of their 127 days in space circling Earth onboard the ISS. The trio blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 15.
