The oldest woman to ever travel to space will be staying for an additional three months aboard the International Space Station. NASA's Peggy Whitson is also set to break another record by being the U.S. astronaut who has stayed the longest in space. She is also the female astronaut to have spent the most hours during spacewalks.
The record-breaking space explorer is set to command Expedition 51 on the International Space Station starting next week. However, her crew mates European Space Agency's Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy will return to Earth in June.
Whitson says that this has been great news since she loves being up in space, living and working aboard the space station. She said that her greatest contribution is to squeeze all of her time there and three months is all she could wish for.
NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos apparently decided for Whitson's extension at the ISS since there is a vacant cosmonaut post among the space station crew. This also means that there is an empty seat on the Soyuz spacecraft that can transport three astronauts at most. So if Whitson leaves in June with her Expedition 51 crew mates, the space station would have one vacant post, instead of six full posts.
By the end of April, the ISS Expedition 51/52 crew will welcome the arrival of NASA's Jack Fischer and Roscosmos' Fyodor Yurchikhin. This means that Whitson will return to Earth when Fischer and Yurchikhin end their mission in September.
Whitson will set a new record for the longest time spent in space by an American astronaut. Currently, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams holds the title for 534 days in space in 2016 while Whitson has spent 516 days in space. ISS Expedition 50 commander Shane Kimbrough will hand over the command of the space station to Whitson on Sunday, April 9. She holds the record as the first woman to command the space station twice.