mary cleave An astronaut who became involved in NASA’s climate research after witnessing increasingly alarming views of Earth’s environment during two space shuttle missions in the 1980s was born in Annapolis, Maryland, on Nov. 27. died at his home. He passed away at the age of 76.
Her nephew, Howard Carter, said the cause was a stroke.
In 1985, Dr. Cleve, an environmental engineer, served aboard Atlantis and helped other astronauts operate a robotic arm during a spacewalk. Four years later, she took part in the same spacecraft that sent the robotic space probe Magellan to Venus for a four-day mission to map the planet’s surface.
What she saw from the shuttle revealed her perspective on a rapidly deteriorating world.
“Looking at the Earth, especially the Amazon rainforest, and the amount of deforestation we’ve seen in just the five years between the two spaceflights, I’m shocked,” she told the Annapolis newspaper The Capital earlier this year. I got really scared.”
And she noticed other changes as well. She told NASA’s oral history Interviewer in 2002.
“The city was a gray stain. The gray stain was growing,” she said. “The air seemed to be dirtier, there were fewer trees, and there were more roads.”
After retiring as an astronaut in 1991, Dr. Cleave transitioned into an astronaut career. Goddard Space Flight Center In Greenbelt, Maryland, she managed to make it. $43 million project The study used satellite sensors to collect ocean data showing the effects of global warming, particularly by measuring the abundance and distribution of phytoplankton. These microscopic plants and algae convert carbon dioxide into cellular material and provide the basis of the marine food chain while producing oxygen.
“I was able to study green slime on a global scale,” she said in a 1997 speech at the Association of Women Geoscientists.
It was like a return to her undergraduate studies in biology at Colorado State University.
“My botany professor said it’s the lower plants that run the world, and I think he was right,” she said at an event for programmers, scientists and other innovators. said in a 2020 interview for the NASA International Space Apps Challenge. Find solutions to problems on Earth and in space using open data from space agencies.
“I was hired into the engineering department because of my ability to handle downstream plants, which is a bit backwards,” she added. “And it worked very well for me.”
Mary Louise Cleave was born on February 5, 1947 in Southampton, New York, and raised in Great Neck, also on Long Island. Her mother, Barbara (Toy) Cleave, was a special education teacher. Her father, Howard, taught band music. Her parents also hosted summer camps.
As a child, Mary built model airplanes, and at age 14, she took flying lessons using money from a babysitter. She went solo at age 16, and she got her pilot’s license a year later, she said. She considered becoming a flight attendant, but she was too short to meet the height requirements, she said.
She earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University in 1969, attended graduate school at Utah State University, earned a master’s degree in microbial ecology in 1973, and a Ph.D. She received her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1979.
While earning her Ph.D., she worked at the Utah Water Research Institute in Logan, where NASA posted notices recruiting scientists and engineers to join the shuttle program, but she was not yet sent. I was told by a colleague that this was not done. The first mission to space.
“He came back to the lab and said, ‘You’re the only engineer I know who’s crazy enough to want to do that,'” she said in her oral history. , especially skiing too fast. ”
She was selected for the shuttle program in 1980. Her duties included helping design better toilets for spacecraft and her role as a control communicator with the Challenger crew in 1983. Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly this flight. space.
In late 1985, Dr. Cleve boarded Atlantis, and the spacecraft launched three satellites into orbit. She conducted organic crystal growth tests for her 3M company, and she inadvertently created an unforgettable moment when she dumped wastewater from the shuttle while flying over Houston as the sun illuminated the shuttle at sunset. . The resulting stream stretched for 15 miles of her and was named “Cleve’s Comet” by Dr. Ride, the flight’s control communications officer.
In late January 1986, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing seven crew members, including two women on board, Christa McAuliffe and Judith Reznik. When shuttle missions resumed in 1988, the crews of the first three flights were all male until Dr. Cleve was chosen to fly Atlantis again.
The mission, best known for Magellan’s deployment, was easier than the first, she said.
“The first day, it just came out of there,” she said in a NASA oral history. “Then it took three days. So I had to take more pictures on that flight.”
After stints with the Astronaut Corps and Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr. Cleave moved to Washington, DC in 2000 to become the Associate Deputy Administrator for Advanced Programs in NASA’s Earth Science Office. From 2005 until he retired in 2007, he served as deputy administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, where he oversaw research and science programs for the Earth, solar system, and space.
“Mary was a force of nature with a passion for science, exploration, and caring for her home planet,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Kavanagh said in a statement.
She is survived by her sisters, Bobbie Cleave and Gertrude Carter;
Dr. Cleve had been assigned to Columbia’s third shuttle flight, but decided not to go. She wanted to start her environmental work, she said.
“The more I thought about it, the more I became concerned about how rapidly the Earth was changing,” she said in her oral history.
“So it’s been just four years and we’ve been looking down, but there’s just been a huge change,” she said, adding, “That’s not a lot of time at all.”