♦ NASA astronaut Sunita Williams has retired from the space agency after 27 years of service. She completed three missions aboard the International Space Station, setting numerous human spaceflight records throughout her career. 

♦ She logged 608 days in space, the second most for a NASA astronaut, and shares the sixth-longest single American spaceflight of 286 days with Butch Wilmore during NASA's Starliner and Crew-9 missions.

♦ She has also completed nine spacewalks, totalling 62 hours and 6 minutes, ranking as the most spacewalk time by a woman and fourth-most on the all-time cumulative spacewalk duration list.

♦ Williams first launched aboard space shuttle Discovery with STS-116 in December 2006 and returned aboard Atlantis with the STS-117 crew. In 2012, she lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a 127-day mission as part of Expedition 32/33 and went on to serve as space station commander for Expedition 33.