Peggy Whitson, who will turn 57 this February, is the oldest woman in space. She will celebrate her birthday aboard the International Space Station (ISS) where she is currently assigned for a 6-month mission. This is her third time aboard ISS.
The biochemist from Iowa first went to space in 2002. She became the first woman to command the station in 2007. This time, due to her experience and significant contribution, she is appointed the commander again. It is the first time a woman is assigned commander on an ISS mission twice.
Being a 57-year-old woman in space is a far cry from John Glenn's space shuttle mission at 77. However, it is enough to break the 2007 record set by Barbara Morgan, a fellow American, who was 55 at the time, the Telegraph says.
In Peggy Whitson's recent ISS mission, she is accompanied by two other astronauts: French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Olev Novitskiy.
They lifted off from a Russian facility in Kazakhstan in November and went into orbit eight minutes later. They are joined by two other astronauts aboard ISS, the KSCJ reports.
Aside from being the oldest woman in space, at the end of her current mission, Whitson will also beat the record of the longest time in space at a length of a year and a half, among American astronauts.
This means that by the end of her mission, she will have logged on 534 days in space, a U.S. record set in 2012 by Jeffrey Williams.
She also held the record of the most hours of spacewalking by a woman, about 40 hours. It was not until 2012 that a fellow woman, Sunita Williams broke the record at 50 hours of cumulative spacewalking time.
With recent technological advances as reported earlier, the oldest woman in space states in an interview that she wishes she could live to see NASA finally put people in Mars.
