20 years of Columbia tragedy: What really happened on Kalpana Chawla’s last space flight?

The tragedy struck on February 1, 2003, when the world was waiting for ‘Columbia’, the space shuttle, to return to Earth after a 15-day stint in space, living and working in zero gravity. The spacecraft had seven astronauts on board, including India's Kalpana Chawla.

The space shuttle crashed, killing the entire team of astronauts on board.

Kalpana Chawla

Kalpana Chawla was born on March 17, 1962 in Karnal, Haryana and did her schooling at Tagore School, Karnal. Chawla obtained a degree in aeronautical engineering from Punjab Engineering College.

After completing her engineering degree, she moved to the US, where she did her master's degree from the University of Texas and earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado.

She started working at the prestigious The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)  in powered-lift computational fluid dynamics in 1988. NASA later selected her to be an astronaut in December 1994.

In 1997 Kalpana Chawla became the first Indian-born woman to go to space.

On her first flight to space in 1997, Chawla was part of the STS-87 mission that made 252 orbits of the Earth, travelling 6.5 million miles in 376 hours and 34 minutes.

Columbia tragedy

This was on the morning of February 1 when everyone at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral was waiting for the Columbia to return smoothly to earth after spending 15 days in the vacuum of space.

LeRoy Cain, NASA's Entry Flight Director, had given the final green light to Shuttle commander Rick Husband to start the deorbit and reentry procedures for descent STS-107. This was the start to end the Columbia's 28th mission to space.

What happened next shook the entire world, People saw flames and sparks in the sky, and Columbia was shattered and gone forever, along with its passengers. The seven astronauts on board were later declared dead and killed in action.

What Happened?

After the initiation of the reentry procedure of Columbia, telemetry indicated that the hydraulic fluid temperatures went off-scale low, and nothing could point out or explain the fault. In contrast, all the other hydraulic system indications were good. This off-scale low fluid temperature caused a sudden loss in tire pressure on the left side, which made the shuttle almost impossible to land due to not having proper tire pressure.

As per the reports by Space Safety Magazine, with each passing second, more and more sensors in Columbia started to malfunction, leading to the loss of all kinds of communication. Efforts of reestablishing contact with the radar and relocating the spacecraft by Houston failed. The disaster was struck by then, and the reports of people spotting fireballs in the sky hit the headlines making the biggest nightmare of the team come to life.

Commander Michael P. Anderson, Mission Specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel B. Clark, and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon of the Israeli Space Agency, adding Commander Rick D. Husband and Pilot William C. “Willie” McCool were among the 7 astronauts who died in this tragedy.

The Shuttle program was shut for two years following the Columbia disaster. An intense investigation was launched, revealing that the beginning of this tragedy happened on the day of its take-off itself (January 27th 2003). The spacecraft wing was breached because a large piece of foam had fallen from the shuttle's external tank.

Right after 82 seconds of launching the shuttle from Cape Canaveral, the piece of foam fell and was later seen striking the wing of the spacecraft. It was later revealed that the hole caused atmospheric gases to bleed into the shuttle as it went ahead with its reentry to the earth leading to the sensor loss and eventually the disaster.

The world saw the whole incident on television sets across the globe.