New space mission duration record by a woman

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Italian astronaut on space station sets new mission duration record by a woman

June 6, 2015 - A 38-year-old Italian astronaut has broken the record for the most time in space on a single mission by a woman. And she still has five more days until she is scheduled to return home to Earth.

Samantha Cristoforetti set the record on Saturday (June 6) at 11:04 a.m. EDT (1504 GMT), surpassing the 194 days, 18 hours and 2 minutes logged by NASA astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams onboard the International Space Station in June 2007. If Cristoforetti's flight home on Thursday (June 11) proceeds as planned, she will have been in space for 199 days, 16 hours and 42 minutes in total — give or take a few minutes based on when her Soyuz spacecraft lands on the steppe of Kazakhstan.

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