Mary Cleave, who glimpsed a devastated Earth from space, dies at 76

Mary Cleave, An astronaut who saw increasingly alarming images of Earth’s changing environment during two Space Shuttle missions in the 1980s, prompting her to work in climate research for NASA, died Nov. 27 at her home in Annapolis, Maryland. She was 76.

Her cousin Howard Carter said the cause was a stroke.

In 1985, Dr. flew. Cleave, an environmental engineer, aboard Atlantis and helped operate the robotic arm during other astronauts’ spacewalks. Four years later, she took part in a four-day mission on the same spacecraft when it sent the Magellan robotic spacecraft to Venus to map the planet’s surface.

What she saw from the shuttle gave her insight into a rapidly deteriorating world.

“When I look at the Earth,” she told the Annapolis newspaper The Capital this year, “especially the Amazon rainforest, the amount of deforestation that I could see, just in the five years between my two space flights down there, made me terrified. ”

And she saw other changes, she told an oral history of NASA interviewer in 2002.

“Cities were gray spots; the gray spots were getting bigger,” she said. “The sky looked dirtier, less trees, more roads, all that stuff.”

After retiring as an astronaut in 1991, Dr. Cleave over to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She succeeded a $43 million project which used a satellite sensor to collect ocean data showing the impact of global warming, specifically by measuring the abundance and distribution of phytoplankton. These microscopic plants and algae convert carbon dioxide into their cell material and form the base of the marine food chain while producing oxygen.

“I get to study green slime on a global level,” she said in a 1997 speech to the Association for Women Geoscientists.

It was a return of sorts to her undergraduate studies in biological sciences at Colorado State University.

“My botany professor told me that lower plants keep the world going, and I think he was right,” she said in a 2020 interview with the NASA International Space Apps Challenge, an event for programmers, scientists and other innovators to use open data of the space agency to find solutions to problems on Earth and in space.

“I got into engineering because of my ability to work with lower-end factories, which is a bit backwards,” she added. “And that turned out very well for me.”

Mary Louise Cleave was born on February 5, 1947 in Southampton, NY, 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 had a summer camp.

Mary built model airplanes as a child and at 14 used her babysitting money for flying lessons. She said she soloed at age 16 and got her pilot’s license a year later. She thought about becoming a flight attendant, she said, but was too short to meet the height requirement.

She earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado State in 1969 and went to Utah State University for postdoctoral work, where she earned a master’s degree in microbial ecology in 1973 and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering in 1979.

While completing her doctorate, she was working at the Utah Water Research Laboratory in Logan when a colleague told her about a notice NASA had placed in a local post asking scientists and engineers to join the shuttle program, which had not yet sent its first mission into space.

“He came back to the lab and said, ‘You’re the only engineer I know who’s crazy enough to want to do something like that,’” she said in the oral history, “because I always liked to do crazy things. , including skiing too fast.”

She was chosen for the shuttle program in 1980. Her assignments included helping design a better toilet for the craft and serving as a Mission Control communicator with the crew of Challenger in 1983, a flight in which Sally Ride became the world’s first American woman. room.

In late 1985, with Dr. Cleave aboard Atlantis, the spacecraft delivered three satellites into orbit. She conducted organic crystal growth testing for the company 3M and created an unintentionally memorable moment when she dumped wastewater from the shuttle at sunset while flying high over Houston, with the sun illuminating the shuttle; the resulting stream extended for 15 miles and was described by Dr. Ride, the Mission Control communicator for that flight, dubbed “Cleave’s Comet”.

In late January 1986, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing seven crew members, including the two women on board, Christa McAuliffe and Judith Resnik. When shuttle missions resumed in 1988, the first three flights consisted of all-male crews, until Dr. Cleave was chosen to ride the Atlantis again.

She said the mission, best known for deploying the Magellan, was a breeze compared to her first.

“The first day it’s gone from there,” she said in the NASA oral history. “Then we had three days. So I was allowed to take many more photos on that flight.

After her service in the astronaut corps and at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr. Cleave moved to Washington, DC in 2000 to become NASA’s Deputy Assistant Administrator for Advanced Planning in the Office of Earth Science. As associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate from 2005 until her retirement in 2007, she oversaw research and science programs related to Earth, the solar system and the universe.

“Mary was a force of nature with a passion for science, research and caring for our home planet,” Bob Cabana, NASA’s associate administrator, said in a statement.

She is survived by her sisters, Bobbie Cleave and Gertrude Carter.

Dr. Cleave was assigned to a third shuttle flight, on the Columbia, but decided not to go; she was eager to begin her environmental work, she said.

She told the oral history that “the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me how quickly the Earth is changing.”

“I mean, just four years and I looked down and there were just huge changes,” she said. and added, “That’s really no time at all.”