A prayer meeting to mark the anniversary was held in Chawla's hometown Karnal in India's northern state of Haryana, NDTV 24X7 news channel reported.

Hundreds of people lined up to pay tributes at the school at which Chawla studied about three decades ago, television footage showed.

Men and women laid flowers and bowed before a photograph of Chawla, in a silent prayer ceremony for the astronaut who had become a source of Indian national pride.

Later, Rakesh Sharma, India's lone surviving astronaut, released a book titled "Kalpana Chawla: India's First Woman Astronaut," the United News of India (UNI) news agency said.

The book narrates Chawla's journey from the dusty, sleepy Karnal to realising her dream of space travel at NASA in the United States and her Columbia mission last year.

"Kalpana died a hero and role model for many a young woman, especially in India, and particularly those in her hometown Karnal, where she returned so often to encourage young girls to follow in her footsteps," said Sharma, speaking at Sunday's memorial service.

"The love and respect one feels from this gathering proves that Kalpana is not gone ... she is among us, immortalised as a permanent star in the sky, where she always belonged to," UNI quoted Sharma as saying.

Seated on a makeshift dias during the ceremony was Neha Bajaj, a student at Chawla's school and her look-alike, the report said.

Bajaj is playing the role of Chawla in a 130-million-rupee (2.8-million-dollar) Indian movie scheduled to start filming in April this year.

It is to be shot on location in United States and Israel, the UNI report said.

Chawla, a 41-year-old naturalized American, was the first woman to be admitted to the aerospace department at India's Punjab Engineering College.

She left India in the 1980s for the United States, where she earned a doctorate at the University of Colorado and joined NASA in 1988. She was selected to be an astronaut in 1994.

She completed her first space expedition in 1997 on shuttle STS-87 and was considered the most experienced astronaut on the Columbia, which disintegrated 16 minutes before it was due to land in Florida on February 1 last year.

Chawla lived in Texas with her American husband, who was in the Indian capital earlier this month to collect an award from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee honouring his late wife for her achievements.

Last year Vajpayee announced that India's newest weather satellite, launched in September 2002 by an indigenous space rocket, would be named after Chawla.

SPACE.WIRE