NASA said Wednesday it will send astronaut Kate Rubins back to the International Space Station this fall, making her the second UC San Diego graduate to serve aboard the orbiting outpost this year.

The 41-year-old Rubins spent 115 days on space station in 2016, during a mission in which she became the first person to sequence DNA in space. She was focusing on her specialty; Rubins earned a bachelors degree in microbiology at UCSD in 1999.

Rubins is now scheduled to fly back to the space station on Oct. 14 aboard a Soyuz spacecraft that will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

On Saturday, NASA sent astronauts to space station for the first time aboard the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft developed by SpaceX. It was the final flight test of Dragon. NASA will phase in the rocket-spacecraft for upcoming missions into space.

Rubins will conduct research using the Cold Atom Lab to study the use of laser-cooled atoms for future quantum sensors, and will work on a cardiovascular experiment that builds on an investigation she completed during her previous mission, NASA said in a statement.

The news about her new appointment comes five weeks after Jessica Meir returned to Earth after spending about seven months on the station. Meir earned a doctorate in marine biology at UCSDs Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2009.

During the mission, Meir was part of the first all-female team of spacewalkers. Meir, 42, also appeared in station-to-ground telecasts in which she told people who were sheltering-in-place from the novel coronavirus how to deal with isolation.

Both women are New Englanders. Meir was born in Caribou, Maine. Rubins was born in Farmington, Conn.

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NASA will send another UC San Diego grad to the space station - The San Diego Union-Tribune