University of Colorado at Boulder alumna Kalpana Chawla, a mission specialist on a 1997 NASA shuttle flight, will talk about her experiences Wednesday, Sept. 23, in the College of Engineering and Applied Science.
Chawla flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia in November 1997. Also on the mission was Takao Doi, a former postdoctoral fellow and adjoint professor in CU's aerospace engineering department.
Chawla's public talk, "A Space Shuttle Mission in Low-Earth Orbit," will be from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in room ECCR 245 of the engineering college classroom wing. Refreshments will be provided.
The talk is part of the K.D. Wood Colloquium sponsored by CU-Boulder's department of aerospace engineering sciences and co-hosted by the CU-Boulder Women in Engineering Program and the CU student chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Chawla, an American born in India, received her doctorate in aerospace engineering from CU-Boulder in 1988 under Professor C.Y. Chow. Chawla, 36, is the second woman astronaut from CU-Boulder to fly in space. Marsha Ivins, who graduated with a bachelor聮s degree in aerospace engineering in 1973, has flown on four NASA space shuttle missions, most recently in January 1997.
The six Columbia astronauts on Chawla's mission spent 16 days studying the sun聮s outer atmosphere. The crew deployed a satellite that gathered solar information and also conducted a number of microgravity experiments. Chawla will talk about living and working in space, including tending microgravity experiments in materials and agricultural science, deploying the satellite, and space station assembly procedures.
Color images of Chawla can be downloaded from the World Wide Web at: . For more information contact Jim Scott in the CU-Boulder public relations office at 303-492-3114.