Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Without much fanfare, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will return to Earth on Saturday night—it will be Sunday morning on the steppes of Kazakhstan—aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. Quietly, she will have spent 288 days in space, or nearly 10 months. The duration of her spaceflight will fall short of only one other US astronaut, Scott Kelly, who returned to Earth in 2016 with a lot more attention after 340 days.
Whitson is known around NASA's Johnson Space Center as perhaps the agency's most efficient astronaut in space, regularly getting ahead of her timelines, research, and maintenance tasks for each day. Mission controllers typically have to come up with extra work. Partly because of this, she is one of only a handful of NASA astronauts to have been selected to serve three rotations on the International Space Station.
As a result of these three long duration spaceflights, the biochemist has now logged 665 days in space. This cumulative time in space easily ranks her as the American flier with the most experience in orbit, far above the 534 days tallied by NASA's Jeff Williams and 520 days of Scott Kelly. Whitson only lags behind seven Russian men, several of whom spent time both on the International Space Station as well as Russia's Mir station.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @07:59AM (3 children)
Your inability to link to a Wikipedia article is proof of your misogyny.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:11AM (2 children)
Does this work better? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riri_Williams [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:15AM (1 child)
I apologize for "fixing" that link. It's utter crap. Illiterate simians wrote most of that page. It's hard to say, but I suspect they were orangutans. Could have been any of the great apes, I suppose, but it seems like orangutan chatter to me.
(Score: 3, Funny) by dry on Monday September 04 2017, @02:12AM
Orangutans are actually pretty technically literate, try googling "Orangutan zoo escape".
The story told by zookeepers about the great apes when given a screwdriver.
The Gorilla jumps back in fear, and then tries to eat it.
The Chimp takes the screwdriver and tries everything except using it as a screwdriver.
The Orangutan acts disinterested, loses it and then disassembles his cage in the middle of the night.
Also the Librarian was an Orangutan, handy for getting to the high shelves but easy to bribe with a banana.