Kalpana Chawla (1962 – 2003), was an Indian-born American astronaut and mechanical engineer who became the first Indian-born woman to go to space in 1997 on the Space Columbia Shuttle. She died on her second flight when the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere in 2003.

Chawla was born on August 1, 1961 in Karnal, India. She graduated from Tangore School, India, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from Punjab Engineering College, a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado. Chawla began her career at NASA Ames Research Center in 1988. In December 1995, she was selected by NASA to be an astronaut candidate in the 15th Group of Astronauts. Her first flight was in November 1997. For her second Space Shuttle flight, she joined six other members of the crew on a 16-day flight on the Colombia Space Shuttle that departed Earth on January 17, 2003. Tragically, on February 1, 2003, 16 minutes before the scheduled landing, she and her crew perished. Kalpana Chawla remains the first person from India to go into space and a National hero.

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was a noted scientist and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. Born in Warsaw, Poland, Maria Skolodowska-Curie moved to Paris in 1891 to study at the Sorbonne. Soon after, she joined a research laboratory and in 1898, she and her husband Pierre expanded on Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity, discovering two new elements, Polonium and Radium. This discovery earned Curie her first Nobel Prize, in Physics. She won a second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911, becoming the first person to earn two such awards. Curie died in France in 1934 from leukemia, thought to be caused by exposure to radiation.