Kalpana chawla

HVGHFHG

1. Page no1

2. Page no2

EARLY LIFE OF KALPANA
CHAWLA
Kalpana Chawla was born on March
17, 1962 in Karnal, Punjab, now in
Haryana, 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 beco me 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.

3. Page no3


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,

4. Page no4

"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.
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.

5. Page no5

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.


Awards
Posthumously awarded:
 Congressional Space Medal of Honor
 NASA Space Flight Medal
 NASA Distinguished Service Medal
Memorials
 The girls hostel in NIT Bhopal (Maulana Azad
National Institute of Technology) was renamed
to Kalpana Chawla Bhavan.
 The Kalpana Chawla ISU Scholarship fund was
founded by alumni of the International Space

6. Page no6

University (ISU) in 2010 to support Indian
student participation in international space
education programs.
 The Kalpana Chawla Memorial Scholarship
program was instituted by the Indian Students
Association (ISA) at the University of Texas at
El Paso (UTEP) in 2005 for meritorious graduate
students.
 The Kalpana Chawla Outstanding Recent Alumni
Award at the University of Colorado, given since
1983, was renamed for Chawla.
 In Karnal, Chawla's birthplace, at least 30,000
school children and citizens joined hands to
make a 36.4-km-long human chain to support
the demand for a Kalpana Chawla Government
Medical College in the city, which was announced
by Health Minister of India C. P. Thakur and
later promised by Prime Minister of India
Manmohan Singh. The Kalpana Chawla Medical
College Nirman Committee, backed by volunteers
and activists of various organizations, supported
by students from 34 schools, swarmed the roads
and formed a chain along the roads in Karnal to
demonstrate that they continued to revere
Chawla as an outstanding astronaut. On

7. Page no7

November 18, 2013, the foundation stone of
the college was laid in her memory by the state
government.
 Asteroid 51826 Kalpanachawla, one of seven
named after the Columbia's crew.
 On February 5, 2003, India's prime minister
announced that the meteorological series of
satellites, MetSat, was to be renamed as
"Kalpana". The first satellite of the series,
"MetSat-1", launched by India on September
12, 2002, is now known as "Kalpana-1".
"Kalpana-2" was expected to be launched by
2007.
 74th Street in Jackson Heights, Queens, New
York City has been renamed 74th Street
Kalpana Chawla Way in her honor.
 The University of Texas at Arlington, where
Chawla obtained a Master of Science degree in
aerospace engineering in 1984, opened a
dormitory named Kalpana Chawla Hall i

the government of Karnataka in 2004 for young
women scientists.
 t Punjab Engineering
College is named after Chawla. In addition, an

8. Page no8

award of INR twenty-five thousand, a medal,
and a certificate is instituted for the best
student in the Aeronautical Engineering
department.

Chawla.
 Florida Institute of Technology's
student apartment complexes, Columbia Village
Suites, has halls named after each of the
astronauts, including Chawla.
 Mars Exploration Rover mission
has named seven peaks in a chain of hills, named
the Columbia Hills, after each of the seven
astronauts lost in the Columbia shuttle disaster.
One of them is Chawla Hill, named after
Chawla.
 Steve Morse from the band Deep Purple
created the song "Contact Lost" in memory of
the Columbia tragedy along with her interest in
the band. The song can be found on the album
Bananas.
 Peter David named a shuttlecraft,
the Chawla, after the astronaut in his 2007
Star Trek novel, Star Trek: The Next
Generation: Before Dishonor.

9. Page no9

 University of Texas at Arlington
dedicated the Kalpana Chawla Memorial on May
3, 2010, in Nedderman Hall, one of the primary
buildings in the College of Engineering.
 of Haryana established the
Kalpana Chawla Planetarium in Jyotisar,
Kurukshetra.
 Indian Institute of Technology,
Kharagpur, named the Kalpana Chawla Space
Technology Cell in her honor.
 Delhi Technological University named a girls'
hostel after Chawla.
 itary housing development at Naval Air
Station Patuxent River, Maryland, has been
named Columbia Colony, and includes a street
named Chawla Way.

Institute of Research and Technology) is named
Kalpana Chawla Hostel.

University is named Kalpana Chawla Hostel.

10. Page no10

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
death of all seven crew members, shortly
before it was scheduled to conclude its
28th mission, STS-107.