Kalpana Chawla Memorial Planetarium

THINGS TO DO, HARYANA Updated : Jan 27, 2016, 04.45 PM IST

Chandni Aggarwal

By heart, Chandni is a passionate traveler and by qualification, she is a computer science graduate and an MBA in Marketing. She has traveled to 15 countries and 3 continents till date. She recently cofounded her travel startup named Rural Odyssey. Her interests include traveling, photography, writing, cooking, meeting with new people and understanding life better. She believes that life is a journey where we have a lot to discover and traveling is the best way to discover life. Traveling makes her strong, practical and an improved version of herself. Her personal blog is The Soaring Spirit.

Photo courtesy: Chandni Aggarwal
This Planetarium is a tribute to Kalpana Chawla, who was the first Indian woman to enter space. Kalpana hails from Karnal, Kurukshetra's neighbouring city. She died in 2003 when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, while re-entering into earth's atmosphere. This memorial is divided into three sections―a planetarium, a gallery and an Astropark. The planetarium shows a 30-minute movie on astronomical world. The gallery explains various astronomical concepts with the help of three dimensional models and charts. It shows how and why our weight differ on other planets, the formation of day and night, occurrence of different seasons, World Time, Solar system and characteristics of other planets, formation of stars, galaxies, invention of telescopes, zodiac signs, etc. A special section is dedicated to Kalpana Chawla, where pictures are exhibited from her school, college and NASA life. The Astropark has a miniature form of Jantar Mantar, and has fun rides explaining the concept of lunar eclipse, angular momentum, laws of Kepler, optical tree, world time, etc.
This memorial unquestionably gives you a dose of inspiration and you would surely realize that astronomy is joyful and quite an interesting field.
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