A female Italian astronaut just broke an off-world record.
European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti now holds the record for the woman with the most time spent in space for a single mission. Cristoforetti broke the record on June 6, beating out NASA astronaut Sunita Williams' previous record of 194 days set in 2007.
As it stands now, Cristoforetti will be in space for a little more than 199 days before descending back to Earth on a Russian-built Soyuz capsule on June 11.
Cristoforetti is set to come back to Earth from the International Space Station with two of her fellow crew members after their flight home was delayed from late May. If Cristoforetti had returned to Earth as originally planned, she wouldn't have been in space long enough to break the record, according to a report from collectSPACE.com.
Before setting this record, Cristoforetti was perhaps most famous, though, for another accomplishment: helping to install an Italian-made espresso machine on the Space Station.
Cristoforetti, NASA astronaut Terry Virts and Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov were not able to leave the Space Station in May due to the failure of a Russian cargo ship earlier that month. The robotic Progress ship didn't make it to the ISS because of damage it sustained from the rocket's third stage during launch, so mission controllers on the ground delayed Cristoforetti's landing and launch of the next Space Station crew while investigating the Progress problem.
Both the Progress vehicle and the crew-carrying Soyuz capsules that bring people up to the Space Station launch to orbit atop Soyuz rockets from Kazakhstan.
Cristoforetti is currently on the station with two other space explorers going for other records. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is poised to become the first American to spend a continuous year in space during the station's first yearlong mission with cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko.