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Kalpana Chawla (March 17, 1962 – February 1, 2003) was an Indian Americans astronaut and aerospace engineer who was the first woman of Indian origin to fly to space. Chawla expressed an interest in aerospace engineering from an early age and took engineering classes at Dayal Singh College and Punjab Engineering College in India. She then traveled to the United States, where she earned her MSc and PhD, becoming a naturalized United States citizen in the early 1990s.
She first flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist and robotic arm operator aboard STS-87. Her role in the flight caused some controversy due to the failed deployment of the Shuttle-Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy ("Spartan") module. Chawla's second flight was in 2003 on STS-107, the final flight of Columbia. She was one of the seven crew members who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated during its reentry into Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003.
Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the NASA Space Flight Medal, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Several buildings, spacecraft, and extraterrestrial landmarks have been named in her honor.
Chawla took basic engineering courses at Dayal Singh College in Karnal. She then attended the aeronautical engineering school at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, where she studied the principles of theoretical aerodynamics. She was one of four women in the program and the first female student to take aerospace engineering classes at the college. Some professors discouraged her from studying aerospace engineering, claiming that it was not suitable for women and suggesting electrical engineering instead. She graduated from the college in 1982 with a Bachelor of Engineering (BEng).
Because she could not take further specialized aerospace engineering courses in India, Chawla traveled to the United States to continue her education in 1982, again facing opposition from her father. She earned her MSc from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in 1984, with her thesis Optimization of cross flow fan housing for airplane wing installation. She met her husband, pilot Jean-Pierre Harrison, while at UTA, and the two married on December 2, 1983.
Chawla then attended the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), where she first decided that she wanted to join the space program, receiving her PhD in 1988 with the thesis Computation of dynamics and control of unsteady vortical flows. While attending CU Boulder, Chawla began taking flying lessons at the Boulder Municipal Airport, eventually receiving commercial pilot's licenses permitting her to fly various types of land and seaplanes, as well as gliders. She later became certified as a flight instructor for single-engine airplanes and flight instruments.
Chawla joined Overset Methods, Inc, a non-profit research organization based in Los Altos, California, as both a research scientist and the organization's vice president in 1993. Her work focused on simulating problems involving multiple moving objects. While in Los Altos, she joined the West Valley Flying Club at the Palo Alto Airport and learned Bharatanatyam from the Abhinaya Dance Company in San Jose. In December 1994, she returned to NASA to undergo training as a candidate astronaut at the Johnson Space Center as part of NASA Astronaut Group 15, eventually being assigned to the EVA and robotics division of the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1995.
During the mission, Chawla was assigned to deploy one of the shuttle's payloads: the Spartan research module. Due to a power surge that damaged its control system, Spartan failed to perform its expected pirouette movement. Chawla attempted to grapple the satellite with the shuttle's robotic arm but did not receive a clear signal on the control panel showing it was secured, causing her to move the arm back. In the process, she accidentally hit the Spartan, causing it to spin at two degrees per second. Fellow astronaut Kevin R. Kregel also attempted to grapple the payload by matching its spin with the shuttle's, but this movement was ultimately aborted. In the end, a spacewalk was required to retrieve the payload.
Chawla also supervised and performed experiments as part of the fourth United States Microgravity Payload mission (USMP-4). As part of this mission, Chawla studied how to mix liquids evenly to create specific metal combinations that could be used in future computer chips. Using Columbia's Middeck Glovebox, she worked with to understand the causes behind their separation.
members of the press criticized Chawla for her handling of the Spartan payload, but Kregel refused to assign blame in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel stating that:
NASA formed a team to investigate the deployment failure on December 4, 1997. The investigation initially attributed the failure to "crew error", but Chawla was ultimately exonerated, with the investigators citing insufficient training, errors in software interfaces, and poor communication with ground control as the causes of the incident. In all, as part of the STS-87 mission, Chawla traveled 10.4 million miles in 252 orbits of the Earth, logging more than 376 hours (15 days and 16 hours) in space.
After the mission, in January 1998, Chawla was given a technical assignment advising shuttle engineers on different aspects of payload development and the astronaut experience. Soon after, she was selected to head the Astronaut Corps' Crew Systems and Habitability department.
STS-107 was a multidisciplinary scientific mission modeled after the previous STS-90. The crew was assigned to two teams working in shifts to ensure that experiments were conducted nonstop. Chawla worked on the Red Team alongside fellow astronauts Ilan Ramon, Laurel Clark, and Rick Husband. She performed a variety of experiments while in orbit, researching Space farming as well as the properties of combustion, crystal growth, granular materials, and mist. Overall, the crew of STS-107 performed over 80 experiments in various disciplines.
As the flight engineer, Chawla was tasked, alongside mission specialist Clark, with assessing the shuttle's system before reentry on February 1. Columbia began reentry on 8:44 a.m. on February 1. At 8:54 a.m, four sensors on the shuttle's wing failed, and at 9:00 a.m, the shuttle began disintegrating in the sky above Texas, killing all seven crew members aboard. In 2003, a report by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that a piece of insulating foam broke off from the shuttle's external tank during liftoff, striking the left wing of the orbiter. When the Columbia began reentry, hot gases entered the damaged wing, leading to the shuttle's destruction.
NASA established a team near Hemphill, Texas, to search for the remains of the crew. On February 4 or 5, NASA began transporting the recovered remains to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Dover Air Force Base. By February 11, all crew members' remains had been recovered, including Chawla's. A memorial service was held in Hemphill that afternoon. Her remains were ultimately cremated and scattered at Zion National Park.
]]Seven peaks in the Columbia Hills on Mars were named after the Columbia astronauts on February 2, 2004, with one of them being named after Chawla. Two days later, on February 4, Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President George W. Bush. She was also awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. In March, the Government of Karnataka instituted the "Kalpana Chawla Award" to recognize young female scientists. Then, in September, UTA, where Chawla obtained her MSc in 1984, opened "Kalpana Chawla Hall," also known as "KC Hall". Chawla's father was present for the hall's dedication. The lunar crater "Chawla" was named after her in 2006. The Kalpana Chawla Planetarium in Haryana was also dedicated to her in 2007. Novelist Peter David named a shuttlecraft, the Chawla, after her in his 2007 Star Trek novel, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Before Dishonor. In 2010, a memorial display was dedicated to Chawla in UTA's Nedderman Hall.
In 2017, the Kalpana Chawla Government Medical College was established in Karnal. Then, in 2020, she became the focus of the second season of the National Geographic documentary series Mega Icons alongside musician A. R. Rahman, actress Deepika Padukone, and industrialist Ratan Tata. The fourteenth contracted Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft mission, which was launched in October 2020 to deliver supplies to the International Space Station, was named the S.S. Kalpana Chawla in her honor. A fictionalized version of Chawla appears in the 2023 movie A Million Miles Away, where she is played by actress Sarayu Rao.
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