Kalpana Chawla

In 1983, Kalpana Chawla married Jean-Pierre Harrison, a French-American flying instructor and a author, knowns for his two books: ‘The Edge of Time: The Authoritative Biography of Kalpana Chawla’ and ‘Principles of Helicopter Flight’. The couple did not have any children. In 1991, she became an American citizen.

Chawla died on February 1, 2003 at around 9 AM, when STS-107 disintegrated over Texas. The damage caused at the time of its launch allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate and destroy its internal wing structure when it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, eventually leading to the disintegration of the spacecraft.

The mortal remains of all the crew members were later identified. Chawla’s remains were cremated and her ashes were scattered at National Park in Utah in accordance to her wish.

Kalpana Chawla was born on 17 March 1962 in Karnal, a city located in the Indian state of Haryana. However, her official date of birth, which was altered to enable her to appear for her matriculation examination, was 1 July 1961. At home, she was called Monto.

Her father, Banarasi Lal Chawla, originally from the Multan district of West Punjab, relocated to Haryana after the country was partitioned in 1947. On coming to India, he started working as a street hawker; later a cloth seller and a metal fabricator. Eventually he set up a tire manufacturing business.

Her mother, Sanyogita Chawla, was a homemaker. She was a very supportive and liberal lady. At that time, girls’ education was considered a luxury; yet she made sure that all her girls went to school.

Kalpana was born youngest of his parents’ four children; she had two elder sisters named Deepa and Sunita and an elder brother named Sanjay. From the very beginning, the children were encouraged to work hard and to gather knowledge.

According to her brother Sanjay, Kalpana was the most intelligent of them. Always a precarious and confident child with lots of natural curiosity, she loved to discover how things worked. The sky, with stars twinkling in it, also caught her fancy.

In 1988, Kalpana Chawla began her career at NASA’s Ames Research Center. There, she started working on power-lift computational fluid dynamics, concentrating on the concept of vertical and/or short take-off and landing. Once the project was complete, she began working on mapping of flow solvers to parallel computers.

In 1993, she was made Vice President of Overset Methods Inc. and moved to Los Altos, California, with the responsibility of developing efficient techniques to perform aerodynamic optimization and implementing the same. There, she formed a team of researchers and began working on simulation of moving multiple body problems.

In December 1994, she was selected to join NASA Astronaut Corps, a unit of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Its job is to select, train, and provide astronauts not only for U.S., but also for international space missions and is based at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston.

In March 1995, she joined Johnson Space Center as an Astronaut Candidate in the 15th Group of Astronauts. There, she underwent rigorous training for one year, at the end of which she was assigned to the Astronaut Office EVA/Robotics and Computer Branches to work as crew representative.

As crew representative, she was assigned to work on the development of Robotic Situational Awareness Displays. Besides, she was also assigned to test space shuttle control software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory.

In November 1996, Chawla was assigned to Space Shuttle Columbia flight, STS-87 as Mission Specialist 1 and the primary Robotic Arm Operator. It was launched on November 19, 1997 from Launch Complex 39B of the Kennedy Space Center.

During her first mission, Chawla spent around 15 days (376 hours, 34 minutes) in space, making 252 orbits around the earth, traveling a total distance of 6.5 million miles. The mission returned to the earth on December 5, 1997.

Among other experiments, STS-87 mainly focused on how the weightless in the space affects physical processes. They also tested EVA tools and procedures and observed the outer atmospheric layers of the sun.

Chawla was especially responsible for deploying a Spartan satellite, which developed a snag, requiring two members of the crew, Winston Scott and Takao Doi, to take a spacewalk and manually capture it. Later it was found that there was an error in the software interfaces, which absolved her of negligence.

In January 1998, after the completion of post flight activities, Chawla joined the Astronaut Offices Crew Systems, serving as crew representative for the shuttle and station flight crew equipment. Subsequently, she served as lead for Astronaut Offices Crew Systems and Habitability section.