Determined to touch the skies an inspired soul.
A Tribute To Kalpana Chawla
Remembering the First Woman Astronaut from India
Astronaut Class:2015 Missions:STS-87,STS-107 TimeInSpace:31d14h54m
An inspired childhood...
Kalpana was born in Karnal, India on 17 March 1962. She was called "Montu" by her family, until she chose her name to be "Kalpana", when she was three. The name means Imagination.She was always drawn to the skies even as a child. She would watch the planes from local flying clubs soar and want to be in them. A flight over the plains of Haryana, India in a Pushpak aircraft as a young girl in the early 1970s was the first step towards her dream.
She graduated from Tagore Bal Niketan School, Karnal in 1976 and received a Bachelor's degree in Aeronautical engineering from India's Punjab Engineering College in 1982. She obtained her Master of Science degree from Univeristy of Texas at Arlington in 1984 after which she went on to earn a second Masters in 1986 and a PhD in 1988 in Aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
U.S. President George W. Bush
Determined to touch the skies...
Kalpana started working at the Nasa Ames Research Center in 1988 and joined Overset Methods Inc. in 1993. The challenger disaster loomed in the background when Kalpana decided she wanted to be an Astronaut. The determined woman that she was, she applied to join the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1995. She was selected for her first flight in 1996. Her first mission STS-87 Columbia (November 19 to December 5 1997) was the fourth U.S Microgravity Payload flight and focused on experiments designed to study how the weightless environment of space affects various physical processes, and on observations of the Sun's outer atmospheric layers. She traveled 10.67 million km, as many as 252 times around the Earth in this mission.The tragic loss of an inspired soul...
In 2000, Chawla 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 Space Shuttle Columbia on the ill-fated STS-107 mission.During the launch of STS-107, Columbia's 28th mission, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the left wing of the orbiter. When Columbia re-entered the atmosphere of Earth, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate and destroy the internal wing structure, which caused the spacecraft to become unstable and slowly break apart. Chawla died in this disaster on February 1, 2003, when the Columbia disintegrated over Texas sixteen minutes before landing, shortly before it was scheduled to conclude its 28th mission, STS-107.
To know more about this inspiring woman who showed the world what it is to truly reach for the skies, read the book written by her husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison. To know the awards she received and for more references, please read her Wikipedia.
Credit : Juli Singh
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