Dr. Cleave suffered a stroke, said her sister, Bobbie Cleave.
Dr. Cleave covered the program’s early successes and most tragic tragedies during his nearly 40 years at NASA, including flights on the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1985 and 1989. He was in astronaut training in 1981, when Columbia made the first shuttle launch, and in 1983, when Challenger astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. I was a member.
Then, in January 1986, during a Space Shuttle mission, Dr. Cleve watched from a NASA conference room in Houston as the Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven people on board. The crew included teacher Christa McAuliffe; Dr. Cleve was part of the post-disaster team that evaluated potential design flaws, including a broken O-ring on Challenger’s right solid rocket booster.
“Before I got on my first plane, I basically said to my family, ‘I might never come back.’ I think a lot of us understood that the system was really backed into a corner. ,” she said. Said “But that’s what we registered,” NASA’s oral history says.
When the opportunity for another flight came up, Dr. Cleve didn’t hesitate. She was selected as Atlantis’ mission specialist in May 1989 and successfully deployed the Magellan spacecraft to Venus. Magellan went on to map more than 95 percent of the planet’s surface and take measurements of its superheated atmosphere.
During Atlantis’ orbit, Dr. Cleve often overlooked sections of farmland or other deforested gaps in the vast Amazon rainforest. During her mission, she decided to return to environmental research, which was the focus of her research before she joined NASA in 1980.
“The amount of deforestation I saw in the five years between the two spaceflights really scared me,” she says. Said Orlando Sentinel earlier this year.
Dr. Cleave moved on to NASA projects on climate and the environment, leading research that uses satellites to track marine ecosystems, such as levels of phytoplankton and other plants. This data provided further clues about the effects of global warming on the food chain and general ocean health.
In her lectures, Dr. Cleve treated her audience to her self-deprecating wit and copious amounts of candid urgency.
“We were able to study green slime on a global scale,” she said at a 1997 meeting of the Association of Women Geoscientists at Utah’s Snowbird Resort.
She added that the pace and scale of disruption to ocean patterns and ecosystems caused by human-driven climate change is irrefutable. “Boom! There’s no food, there’s less oxygen, and the fish die,” she said, explaining the Pacific warming cycle known as El Niño and its effects on marine life and storms like the monsoon. “And you can kayak down Main Street in Salt Lake City.”
Dr. Cleave said he sees the space shuttle mission as part of important science to assess the effects of climate change and human-caused environmental crises such as pesticides and farm fertilizer runoff into waterways.
“Space-based data collection is the only way to figure it all out,” she once said.
‘Too short’ for airlines
Mary Louise Cleave was born on February 5, 1947 in Southampton, New York, and raised in Great Neck, another community on Long Island. Her father was a music teacher and her mother taught special education. They also operated a summer camp on Lake Champlain for her 20 years.
She began taking flying lessons on Long Island at age 14, using money she earned as a babysitter. She considered becoming a flight attendant. “But I was too short,” she told The New York Times. “Back then you had to be 5 feet 4 inches tall and I was only 5-2.”
She then applied to Cornell University’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Women were not accepted at that time. “There was discrimination based on gender in all the technical schools,” she says.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Colorado State University in 1969, a master’s degree in microbial ecology from Utah State University in 1975, and also a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering in 1979.
One day, a fellow student asked her to check the post office for a notice from NASA recruiting engineers for astronaut training.
“He said, ‘You’re the only engineering student I know who’s crazy enough to do something like this,'” she told Newsday.
“I said, ‘That’s right.'”
On the first Space Shuttle mission in late 1985, Dr. Cleave was the flight engineer who operated the robotic arm that other crew members used during spacewalks to test construction methods for space station construction.
She was also given an emergency mission to fix a malfunctioning toilet on Atlantis, she told NASA oral history interviewer Rebecca Wright.
“Sir, I’m used to working on the other side of the pipe,” she said, elaborating on her comments to air traffic controllers, referring to her past work on water and the environment.
“I guess that’s why he earned the title ‘first plumber in space,'” Wright said.
“Yes,” laughed Dr. Cleve. “Or the “Hygiene Fairy”.”
Dr. Cleave retired from NASA in 2007 as Deputy Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, based in Washington. She then mentored students through the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. scholarship For science, technology, engineering, and math students.
Survivors include two sisters.
Before Dr. Cleve’s second mission to Atlantis, She asked mission specialist Mark C. Lee about her preferred seat location for the launch. It was his first time joining a Space Shuttle crew, and Dr. Cleve gave him the choice of one of four spots on the flight deck, or the only one assigned to him on the lower deck. I thought about it. Dr. Cleve was initially disappointed when Lee chose the flight deck.
“I thought it was a really bad deal. I’m going to be alone there and I can’t see anything,” she said in a NASA interview.
To my surprise, she loved it. “I could scream,” she said, “and I had a great time, and it’s been a ride.”