Person of the Week: Sunita Williams

June 22, 2007 — -- When the Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down safely today, one of its passengers was the record-setting female astronaut Sunita Williams.

During the mission, she managed to set a new endurance record for women -- logging 194 days in orbit after six months on the International Space Station -- and still took time out for charity.

In December she had her long hair cut so she could donate her locks to help those who have lost their hair while fighting an illness.

Long hair is not very practical in space anyway, where she also set the world record for a female astronaut on spacewalks, totaling 29 hours and 17 minutes.

Williams, 41, proved she could not only walk in space but run. When her sister Dina Pandya ran the Boston Marathon April 16, Williams ran her own marathon in space using a treadmill suspended by gyroscopes to minimize any impact of pounding feet on the space station.

"I was thinking about her. If she's going through this, I can do it," Pandya said.

Despite her success in space, Williams said she didn't immediately get her dream job in flight.

"I tell little girls about the story. I started flight school when 'Top Gun' came out, so of course everybody wanted to fly jets," she told ABC News earlier in the week. "That was the cool thing to do, and I put that down as my first choice but got helicopters."

But she said in the end it worked out. "You just sort of take what you get," she said. "Maybe you don't get the first thing that you want. If you are good at what you do and you try hard, some things sort of fall into place," she said.

After flying helicopters for the Navy during the first Gulf War, Commander Sunita Williams was selected to train as an astronaut.

As the Atlantis finished its 14-day trip, Williams had an international cheering squad awaiting her safe return.

Williams has a Slovenian mother and an Indian father who had hundreds of people praying in India. "In my hometown, for seven days everyone is praying," her father, Deepak Pandya, said.