Early life
Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, India. She completed her earlier
schooling at Tagore Baal Niketan Senior Secondary School, Karnal and
completed her Bachelor of Engineering degree in Aeronautical Engineering at Punjab Engineering College at Chandigarh
in 1982. She moved to the United States in 1982 where she obtained a
Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1984. Determined to become an astronaut even in the face of the Challenger disaster, Chawla went on to earn a second Masters in 1986 and a PhD in aerospace engineering in 1988 from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Career
In 1988, she began working at the NASA Ames Research Center as Vice President of Overset Methods, Inc. where she did Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) research on Vertical/Short Takeoff and Landing concepts.
Chawla held a Certificated Flight Instructor rating for airplanes,
gliders and Commercial Pilot licenses for single and multi-engine
airplanes, seaplanes and gliders.
Becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in April 1991, Chawla applied for the NASA Astronaut Corps.
She joined the Corps in March 1995 and was selected for her first
flight in 1996. She spoke the following words while traveling in the
weightlessness of space, "You are just your intelligence". She had
traveled 10.67 million km, as many as 252 times around the Earth.
Her first space mission began on November 19, 1997, as part of the six-astronaut crew that flew the Space Shuttle Columbia flight STS-87. Chawla was the first Indian-born woman and the second Indian person to fly in space, following cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma who flew in 1984 on the Soyuz T-11.
On her first mission, Chawla traveled over 10.4 million miles in 252
orbits of the earth, logging more than 372 hours in space.]During STS-87, she was responsible for deploying the Spartan Satellite which malfunctioned, necessitating a spacewalk by Winston Scott and Takao Doi
to capture the satellite. A five-month NASA investigation fully
exonerated Chawla by identifying errors in software interfaces and the
defined procedures of flight crew and ground control.
After the completion of STS-87
post-flight activities, Chawla was assigned to technical positions in
the astronaut office to work on the space station, her performance in
which was recognized with a special award from her peers.
In 2000 she was selected for her second flight as part of the crew of STS-107.
This mission was repeatedly delayed due to scheduling conflicts and
technical problems such as the July 2002 discovery of cracks in the
shuttle engine flow liners. On January 16, 2003, Chawla finally returned
to space aboard Columbia on the ill-fated STS-107 mission. Chawla's responsibilities included the microgravity experiments, for which the crew conducted nearly 80 experiments studying earth and space science, advanced technology development, and astronaut health and safety.
Death
Main article: Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
Chawla died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster which occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, with the loss of all seven crew members, shortly before it was scheduled to conclude its 28th mission, STS-107.
Awards
Posthumously awarded:
