- Kalpana Chawla was born on March 17, 1962, in Karnal, Haryana, India, but her official date of birth was altered to July 1, 1961, to allow her to become eligible for the matriculation exam. She was the first Indian – American astronaut and the first Indian woman in space.
- Chawla obtained a degree in aeronautical engineering from Punjab Engineering College before immigrating to the United States and becoming a naturalized citizen in the 1980s. She earned a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado in 1988, having previously obtained her master’s degree from the University of Texas. She began working at NASA’s Ames Research Center the same year, working on power-lift computational fluid dynamics.
- In 1994, Chawla was selected as an astronaut candidate. After a year of training, she became a crew representative for the Astronaut Office EVA/Robotics and Computer Branches, where she worked with Robotic Situational Awareness Displays and tested software for the space shuttles.
- Chawla’s first opportunity to fly in space came in November 1997, aboard the space shuttleColumbia on flight STS-87. The shuttle made 252 orbits of the Earth in just over two weeks.
- Kalpana Chawla was chosen for the second space mission along with other six crew numbers and on January 16, 2003, she returned aboard Space Shuttle Columbia.
- She won many awards posthumously, they were: Congressional Space Medal of Honor, NASA Space Flight Medal, NASA Distinguished Service Medal.
- 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.
- Chawla’s remains were identified along with those of the rest of the crew members and were cremated and scattered at Zion National Park in Utah as per her wishes.
- In her honour, the first satellite of the Met-Sat series, “MetSat-1”, launched by India on September 12, 2002, was renamed “Kalpana-1”.
