The first Indian woman to go to space is taking another trip to the cosmos, Business Insider India reports.
Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company, named their latest Cygnus spacecraft after Kalpana Chawla. According to Business Insider, the S.S. Kalpana Chawla is set to launch from NASA’s Virginia facility and will be headed to the International Space Station on Sept. 29.
“It is the company’s tradition to name each Cygnus after an individual who has played a pivotal role in human spaceflight,” Northrup Grumman said in a statement, Business Insider reports.
It isn’t the first time the first Indian woman to be an astronaut has been honored, Business Insider notes. A NASA supercomputer bears her name, as well as one of the peaks on the planet Mars’ Columbia Hills.
According to Space.com, Chawla moved to the United States in the 1980s to pursue her master’s and doctorate degrees in aerospace engineering. By 1988, she was researching fluid dynamics at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.
Her training as an astronaut began in the 1990s, Space.com reports, culminating in her first trip to space in 1997. On her second and last trip in February of 2003, Chawla and six other astronauts on the STS-107 died on the way back into the Earth’s atmosphere.
“[Chawla’s] contributions to human spaceflight have had a lasting impact,” Northrup Grumman said, via Twitter. “Her research improved the quality of life for astronauts and paved the way for @Space_Station research”
“Kalpana spent her childhood dreaming of the stars. In 1997, she would finally fly amongst them,” the tweets continued. “The S.S. Kalpana Chawla will continue her legacy of supporting human exploration of space.”
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