Engineer and astronaut Kalpana Chawla was born #OnThisDay in 1962. Chawla began working at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1988. After becoming a naturalized citizen in 1991, Chawla applied for the NASA Astronaut Corps and was selected in 1994 as an astronaut candidate. She completed her first spaceflight in 1997 on STS-87 on Space Shuttle Columbia. Chawla’s second spaceflight, STS-107, launched in 2003. Again aboard Columbia, Chawla and the other six crew members spent 16 days in space and conducted over 80 space experiments. The crew rotated schedules to continue research for 24 hours a day in areas including anti-cancer therapies, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal changes due to space flight, water recycling devices, and testing of various communications devices. Tragically, on the last day of the mission on February 1, 2003, Columbia broke apart while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and all seven members of the crew died. Chawla was 40 when she died, and she had logged ov...