Kalpana Chawla

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kalpana Chawla
Kalpana Chawla
Country: USA / India
Organization: NASA
selected on December 8, 1994
(15th NASA Group)
Calls: 2 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		November 19, 1997
Landing of the
last space flight: 		February 1, 2003
Time in space: 31d 14h 54min
retired on February 1, 2003
(accident)
Space flights

Kalpana Chawla (born March 17, 1962 ; officially July 1, 1961 in Karnal , Haryana , India ; † February 1, 2003 over the southern United States ) was the first woman of Indian origin in space. She died in the Columbia crash in spring 2003.

education

Chawla was the only woman in the aerospace department to study at the Chandigarh Engineering College . After graduating in 1982, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies in aerospace engineering : first she earned a master's degree from the University of Texas in 1984 and received her doctorate four years later from the University of Colorado .

With her doctorate, Chawla got a job at the Ames Research Center at NASA , where she spent five years researching the flow behavior of air in aircraft using computers. In 1993 she joined Overset Methods in Silicon Valley , which had been founded two years earlier, as Vice President . There she continued her work on questions of aerodynamics as head of a research group .

Astronaut activity

In 1994 she was accepted into the NASA astronaut team.

STS-87

On November 19, 1997, Chawla started as a mission specialist aboard STS-87 with the space shuttle Columbia for her first space flight. During the Spacelab flight, the two astronauts Winston Scott and Takao Doi undertook two space exits (EVAs). During the first EVA, they caught the SPARTAN research satellite , which was launched at the beginning of the flight and which Chawla had previously launched and which had tumbled uncontrollably. In addition, the so-called AERCam was tested for the first time, an approximately 40 centimeter ball that is equipped with a position control and a camera system and can explore structures that are difficult to access.

STS-107

Kalpana Chawla in the space shuttle simulator

Chawla and six other astronauts took off on January 16, 2003 on the Columbia space shuttle for the STS-107 mission . About 80 scientific experiments were carried out on this 16-day research mission. When the space shuttle took off, however, a piece of foam came off the outer tank and hit the port wing of the orbiter. The damage was noticed, but not classified as critical by NASA. When the shuttle returned to Earth on February 1, hot gases entered the wing through a damaged heat tile and melted it from the inside. The shuttle got out of hand and broke in the atmosphere. Kalpana Chawla and all the other crew members were killed.

Awards and honors

Among other things, Chawla received the following awards:

In honor of Kalpana Chawla, the Indian space agency ISRO renamed its METSAT-1 weather satellite to Kalpana-1 . In addition, an asteroid in the main belt ( (51826) Kalpanachawla ) was named after her.

See also

Web links

Commons : Kalpana Chawla  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/feb/20spec.htm
personal data
SURNAME Chawla, Kalpana
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian-American astronaut
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1961 or March 17, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Karnal , India
DATE OF DEATH February 1, 2003
Place of death over the southern United States