Kalpana Chawla
"When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system." -Kalpana Chawla
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Kalpana Chawla was an Indian American astronaut and was the first woman of Indian descent to be in space. She was born in East Punjab, India in 1961, and she has always had an interest in aerospace and airplanes since childhood. She graduated from Punjab Engineering College with a degree in aeronautical engineering and then continued her studies in the US. She got her masters in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas, Arlington and her doctorate degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado.
After her studies, Chawla started working at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1988, focusing on computational fluid dynamics. Eventually, she continued her work as Vice President and Research Scientist at Overset Methods, Inc, where her work was often featured in numerous journals and conference papers. Much of her work centered around developing efficient methods to perform aerodynamic optimizations.
In 1991, Chawla was naturalized as a US citizen and joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1995. In 1996, she completed her first space mission on the STS-87 Columbia, whose experiments focused on the effects of weightlessness on certain processes. There was an unfortunate occurrence with the launching of the Spartan satellite as part of this mission, where Chawla mistakenly dispatched it, forcing two members on the mission to spend one hour spacewalking to retrieve it. After the hour, the satellite was far too damaged to be salvaged and thus had to abort the Spartan mission. Eventually, after a multi-month post-mortem, it was concluded that it was likely a software malfunction that led to the satellite’s malfunction.
Seven years later in 2003, Chawla went on her second mission STS-107 on Columbia, which was a 16-day mission to conduct further science experiments in space. After the 16 days in space, as Columbia was re-entering Earth, a section of the shuttle’s polyurethane foam was damaged, and the heat shield was eventually destroyed. This led to the shuttle being unstable, eventually disintegrating sixteen minutes before it was expected to land. Though much of the experiments’ data was saved through satellite transmissions before returning to Earth, the tragedy of the Columbia disaster led to a halt in space missions for two years and ultimately retiring the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
Despite the unfortunate outcome of Columbia, Chawla leaves behind a legacy of achieving the American Dream and inspiration for a new generation of female and Indian engineers. The University of Texas, Arlington has a memorial in honor of Chawla, and her husband has since written an authoritative biography of her life. As a former prime minister of India once said to her, “Kalpana we are proud of you. Each one of us is proud of a person like you who has done such pioneering work. Particularly, the youth and women of India are gaining pride in seeing what you have done in the space. My hearty congratulations.”
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