They Vanished: The Shocking Truth About the Asian Women on the Moon...
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The picture in the thumbnail is of Asia's first woman to go to the moon |
On February 1, 2003, NASA's Columbia space shuttle was returning to Earth.
There were 7 astronauts on board this shuttle. One of them was very special for India. Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla. These astronauts were returning to Earth after spending 2 weeks in space. Their families and friends were eagerly waiting for them. This flight was special for all of them.
But for NASA, it was a routine flight as it was the 28th flight of the Space Mission Columbia program. At 08:44 in the morning, the space shuttle re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. The systems were working as expected and everything seemed normal. On the ground at the space center was the capsule communicator CAPCOM Charlie Hobaugh. He was the person who communicated with the space shuttle. After a few minutes, Charlie Hobaugh spoke to the astronauts in the space shuttle about the tire pressure readings.
"And Columbia Houston we see your tire pressure messages and we didn't copy your last is it instrumentation MMACS?"
On the other hand, mission commander Rick Husband was responding when the line suddenly cut off. He heard only one word from him: "Roger" His response was left incomplete.
Charlie Hobaugh tries to reestablish communication but there is no response from the other side. Ten minutes pass. The attempts continue but there is still no response from the other side. "Hobaugh: Columbia Houston UHF Comm Check."
The NASA team at this space center was unaware that there had been an explosion on the Columbia space shuttle. A few minutes later, Kennedy Space Center receives a call.
"Turn on the TV and watch the news"
The news was full of such scenes. They have lost contact. We can only hope that what we are seeing is not the worst. Some people looked up at the sky and this is what they could see. Like a comet falling to Earth. A burning light. It broke in two and broke into more pieces.
Scattered pieces of this burning light were falling to the ground. At 9:12 a.m. in Texas, pieces of this spacecraft were falling from the sky. By then, NASA had realized that something catastrophic had happened. A few hours later, President George W. Bush addressed the nation.
"My fellow Americans
Ten Days Has Brought Terrible News and Great Sadness to Our Country.
The Columbia Is Lost. There Are No Survivors.
All Seven Astronauts Were Killed and One of Them Was
A 40-Year-Old Indian-Born American
Kalpana Chawla."
A woman whose story became an inspiration for the entire country.
Let's know the story of this woman in some detail.
Kalpana Chawla was born on 17 March 1962 in a conservative family in Karnal, Haryana. The family had mainly Pakistani bloodline and her parents Banarasi Lal Chawla and Sanjeevati Chawla had come to India from Pakistan during the partition. Kalpana was the fourth and youngest child. When she started school, she did not have an official name. Everyone at home called her Manto. When her elder sister took her to school
they asked her name, we said we had not named her yet.
Everyone at home called her by her nickname Manto. So when the need arose, she chose her own name. Kalpana, which means imagination. At that time, no one would have imagined that this little girl would achieve amazing feats in her life.
Her brother Sanjay Chawla says that her struggle with society started from childhood. She often said
"I will show these boys. I am not a silly girl"
Sanjay says she was a very determined girl. Just imagine the 1960s or even today, in India Haryana, boys are preferred in many places. What must have happened in those days?
Kalpana Chawla got interested in space after watching planes fly in the sky. As a child, she used to go to a local flying club with her father. Her parents started noticing her interest, but as she grew up, her father and his professors and teachers advised her not to take up this profession. But there was nothing for girls in India in this career path. Sanjay Chawla says that it was a big shock for everyone. Everyone tried to discourage her, told her not to do it, but no one could stop Kalpana. She completed her bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Punjab Engineering College. And then she went to the US to complete her master's degree from the University of Texas. Although her father was unhappy with her decision to study abroad. Later, in 1988, she completed her PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado. She was 26 years old when she started working at NASA's AIIMS Research Center. Her specialty was fluid dynamics aircraft. That is, the study of how air flows around and around the wings of an aircraft.
She had several pilot licenses. She knew how to fly airplanes, gliders and seaplanes.
In 1991, she became a US citizen. And in 1994, NASA selected 20 out of 4,000 applicants for astronaut training.
One of them was Kalpana Chawla. After 3 years of training, Kalpana made her first flight into space in November 1997. Columbia program flight STS-87. In this space shuttle, she orbited the Earth more than 250 times.
She stayed in space for 2 weeks. The full name of STS is Space Transportation System.
This was the official name of NASA's space shuttle program. It was the fourth program that had human spaceflights. The first was Project Mercury, then Project Gemini, and then the most famous Apollo program, and then this program that began in 1981. It was the longest human spaceflight program in history, lasting until 2011. NASA's goal here was reuse.
To launch the same space shuttle over and over again. So that there was no need to build new space shuttles each time.
Two main space shuttles were used in this program. The first was Challenger and the second was the Columbia space shuttle. After the Columbia disaster, the Discovery Atlantis and Endeavour space shuttles were also used.
Today you can find them in museums. Of all these, Columbia was the first space shuttle
which went into space in April 1981. It completed 27 successful missions before the disaster. Now you might be wondering, was it safe to use the shuttle so many times? Was that the reason for the disaster? The answer is no
The STS program was specifically designed for reuse. After each flight, there is a long process of testing, repairing and refurbishing the shuttles. The real reason for the Columbia disaster was a minor one, but as a concept, there was nothing wrong with the STS program. The 24th flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia was Kalpana Chawla's first space flight.
STS-87 was her mission specialist. She was the main operator of the flight's robotic arm. Her job was to operate a robotic arm on the flight that would deploy the Spartan satellite. A satellite that would be sent to study the outer layer of the Sun, but during the mission, something happened that shook her confidence.
The 1360 kg satellite goes out of control and she fails to retrieve it. After 3 days and a spacewalk, the satellite had to be brought back.
But later NASA scientists congratulated and praised her. She told the University of Texas Magazine
"KC you did a great job."
Many senior astronauts had told her this. It turned out that it was not her fault
but someone else in the shuttle crew. Due to this successful mission, Kalpana became the first Indian-origin woman to go into space and the first South Asian American woman to Indian Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral congratulated her
"Yes Mr. Gujral
I hear you loud and clear.
How do you read me?"
"Kalpana we are proud of you.
Hone of this.
You have done such pioneering work."
"Thank you sir thank you very much."
And how did Kalpana feel when she first went into space?
She said this.
"When you look at the stars and galaxy
you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land
but from the solar system"
That is, before any city, country or continent, we humans belong to the Earth and the solar system. The flight lasted for 16 days and many other scientific experiments were also conducted.
For example, it was observed how plant reproduction works in microgravity. But more interesting were the experiments that were conducted on her second and final flight before the accident. On January 16, 2003 at 10:29 AM, the space shuttle Columbia leaves Earth for the last time. The mission was originally planned for 2001 and was postponed 13 times. Finally, in 2003, it was launched from the Kennedy Space Center. The STS-107 mission had 7 astronauts led by Commander Rick Husband. The payload commander was Michael Anderson and three mission specialists, one of whom was Kalpana Chawla. The pilot was William McCool and the Israel Space Agency's Alan Ramon was a payload specialist. The mission of these astronauts was to conduct 24-hour non-stop experiments. Non-stop did not mean no sleep. It meant working in shifts, of course. During the 16 days they were in space, they conducted about 80 experiments in life sciences, materials science, and fluid physics.
Kalpana Chawla was focusing on microgravity.
How combustion occurs in space.
How fire can be suppressed.
How crystals grow.
And even how prostate cancer grows in space.
Without going into too much detail, it was quite interesting because when cells grow in laboratories on Earth, they grow in two-dimensional monolayers in culture dishes, but in space, cells grow in three dimensions in the form of spheroids. Similarly, cancer tumors form in our bodies. This helped us understand the behavior of tumors. In this mission, a company called SpaceHub collaborated with NASA, with the help of which universities, companies and government agencies around the world could conduct their research in space without going into space themselves. This meant that these astronauts were conducting experiments on their behalf. Actually, children from 6 schools in Australia, China, Israel, Japan and the United States were selected who wanted these astronauts to conduct their experiments.
Spiders Silkworms Organic Crystals
Fishes Flies Ants
How do they react in space?
The children wanted to know this, so experiments were being conducted on it. In these experiments, an interesting thing was discovered about flowers
The fragrance of these flowers on Earth changes in space.
Because data was continuously being transmitted to Earth during the mission, about 30% of the data from these experiments was stored and stored in ground stations. Some videos of successful experiments were recorded which were later sent back to the children, such as those about ants and crystals. However, there were more than 40 experiments. However, an interesting thing here is that there was a living group of roundworms that survived the disaster with minor heat loss because they were kept in aluminum cans. After the disaster, the broken pieces of the spacecraft were recovered. Among them were 5-6 cans whose petri dishes still contained these roundworms. In later missions, such as the second-to-last mission of the STS program, the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2011, some of these roundworms were sent on this mission, but now we come to the biggest question of this topic. What was the cause of this incident? Did the pilot make a mistake? Or did another crew member make hasty decisions? Was it the fault of an astronaut? The truth is that this was not the reason.
None of the 7 astronauts on Columbia did anything wrong and even 3-4 minutes before the accident, none of them had any idea what was going to happen. The CCTV cameras installed in the astronauts' shuttle showed that the astronauts were laughing and joking.
Kalpana Chawla is also saying something. It was only at 8:58 am that the astronauts got a hint that all was not well. Columbia's backup flight software showed some messages on the display to tell them that the four wheels on the left side of the space shuttle had lost pressure and this warning came exactly one minute before the time Columbia lost signal on Earth.
CAPCOM on Earth was trying to communicate about this. The astronauts had no information about this. Some people at NASA knew about the problem. Not only a few hours before the accident, but 16 days before the shuttle was launched.
The thing is, 81 seconds after Columbia's launch, a small piece of foam separated from the shuttle and hit the left wing. This foam was used to connect Columbia's external tank to the main shuttle. It wasn't a big piece. It was only 60 centimeters long and 40 centimeters wide.
It weighed only 750 grams. But it hit the left wing at such a speed that the speed has been estimated to be between 700-900 kilometers per hour.
2-3 days after the incident, some NASA engineers asked STS Program Manager Ron D. Dittimore to take pictures to assess the damage
that had occurred to the space shuttle. They could have used their American spy satellites.
But the engineers said that the chief rejected this request.
That is why, when it was later revealed after the incident, he resigned from his post in April 2003. Admitting his mistake. In 2008, the book ComCheck by space journalists Michael Cabbage and William Hardwood states that
The Department of Defense was ready to use its spy cameras, but the authorities refused. An internal commission was formed to investigate this, called the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
The CAIB for short. In August 2003, the commission issued a comprehensive report that detailed why the Columbia disaster occurred and what caused it.
The report again mentioned NASA's negligence. The failure of NASA's human spaceflight chief, William Reddy, to accept the offer to use spy satellites to monitor the damage to the space shuttle. That is why the damage was not investigated and the mission continued as planned for the next 15 days. Until February 1, when the mission ended and the space shuttle had to return to Earth. The damage to the left wing of the space shuttle left a small hole. As it was descending into the Earth's atmosphere, the damage became even bigger. The small hole allowed air to escape, and there is usually a thermal protection system that maintains the temperature inside the space shuttle, but the air leak caused the hole to grow larger, and as it did, a piece of insulation the size of a suitcase burst. A significant portion of Columbia was now engulfed in flames and gases from the outside. This caused the sensors on the left wing to stop working first. Temperature readings were unavailable. Then tire pressure readings disappeared. And just like that, the spacecraft began to break apart. People on the ground captured this video showing bright flashes. A small piece of foam caused the incident and 7 people lost their lives. However, it is important to note that a 2003 CAIB report stated that such foam attacks occur regularly during space shuttle launches. Images taken from the launch of 79 available missions showed that such foam attacks had been seen on 65 previous missions. Such foam attacks were very common, but the disturbing part about this foam attack was that the piece hit the wrong place at the wrong time.
Another report was published in December 2008, five years after the incident.
The Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report. It showed that the astronauts died within seconds due to a loss of cabin pressure. They did not experience any heat or damage as the Columbia space shuttle was breaking apart. The report attempted to recreate the crew's final minutes.
What happened in those final minutes?
Warning signs and alerts were everywhere. There were problems with tire pressure and landing gear. The report also stated that if the cabin had been better equipped, the astronauts would not have been saved.
(The Breakup of the Crew Module and the Crew's Subsequent Exposure to Hypersonic Entry Conditions Was Not Survivable by Any Currently Existing Capabilities)
After the incident, NASA suspended the space shuttle program for 2.5 years.
And most importantly, the foam ramp design was also changed. The design was changed in such a way that such an incident would not happen again and thankfully, even after 20 years, such an incident has not happened again. The Space Shutter program continued till the International Space Station was operational. When it was finally shut down in July 2011, the program had 135 missions and lasted for 30 years. In those 30 years, 14 astronauts lost their lives in unfortunate accidents and one of them was Kalpana Chawla. India lost its pride but Kalpana Chawla’s impact is seen directly or indirectly on the lives of millions of people.
Kalpana was so passionate about science education that she wanted every girl in her country to get such an education.
That is why she convinced NASA that her secondary school in Karnal, Tagore Bal Niketan Senior Secondary School, could allow the students there to participate in NASA’s Summer Space Experience program.
Every year since 1998, the school has sent two girls to Houston, USA, to study at the United Space School of the Foundation for International Space Education, and Kalpana Chawla would invite them to her home for dinner.
NASA has paid tribute to Kalpana Chawla and other crew members in the past few years.
For example, NASA's landing site on Mars was named Columbia Memorial Station, and there are many asteroids between Mars and Jupiter named after these crew members.
That is why today, somewhere far away in our solar system, an asteroid is orbiting the sun,
whose name is 51826 Kalpana Chawla.
And in this way, Kalpana Chawla will be remembered for the rest of the world.
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