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Mary Cleave, an astronaut who saw increasingly dire scenes of global climate change during two space shuttle missions in the 1980s, inspired him to work in climate research for NASA, he died Nov. 27 at his home in Annapolis, Md. He was 76 years old.
His uncle, Howard Carter, said it was a stroke.
In 1985, Dr. Cleave, an environmental engineer, flew aboard Atlantis, helping to operate his robotic arm during the other astronauts’ walks. Four years later, he participated in a four-day mission on the same spacecraft when he sent the Magellan robotic space probe to Venus to map the planet’s surface.
What he saw from the boat revealed his view of a world that was rapidly deteriorating.
“Look at the world,” he told the Annapolis newspaper The Capital this year, “especially the Amazon forest, the most forests I could see, in just five years in between my two spaceships down, it scared the hell out of me.”
And he saw other changes, he told a NASA story interview in 2002.
“The cities are gray spots; the gray matter is increasing,” he said. “The air looks dirty, less trees, more roads, everything.”
After retiring as an astronaut in 1991, Dr. Cleave to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. There, he was in control a $43-million project used a satellite device to collect ocean data to show the impact of global warming, particularly by measuring the abundance and distribution of phytoplankton. These small plants and algae convert carbon dioxide into their cells and form the base of the marine food chain while producing oxygen.
“I can study green on the whole earth,” she said in a speech to the Association for Women Geoscientists in 1997.
Something that goes back to his undergraduate studies in biology at Colorado State University.
“My chemistry professor told me that low trees are what make the world go around, and I think he’s right,” he said in a 2020 interview with the NASA International Space Apps Challenge, an event for coders, scientists and other innovators. use open data from the space agency to find solutions to problems in Earth and space.
“I was hired as an engineer because of my ability to work with small plants, which is a bit backward,” he added. “And it worked really well for me.”
Mary Louise Cleave was born on February 5, 1947, in Southampton, NY, and grew up in Great Neck, also on Long Island. His mother, Barbara (Toy) Cleave, was a special education teacher. His father, Howard, taught band music. His parents also owned a summer camp.
Mary built model airplanes as a child and at 14 she used her babysitting money for flying lessons. He said he lived alone at 16 and got his pilot’s license a year later. He thought about becoming an aviator, he said, but was too short to reach the desired height.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Colorado State in 1969 and attended Utah State University for graduate work, earning a master’s degree in microbial ecology in 1973 and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering in 1979.
While completing his doctorate, he was working at the Utah Water Research Laboratory in Logan when a co-worker told him about an announcement that NASA had placed on a local office asking for scientists and engineers. to participate in the transfer program, which has not been sent. his first mission in space.
“He came back to the lab and said, ‘You’re the only engineer I know who’s stupid enough to want to do something like that,'” he recounted in the story, “because I liked to do crazy things. , ski very fast, etc.”
He was selected for the shuttle program in 1980. His assignments included helping to design a better toilet for the spacecraft and serving as a Mission Control liaison with the Challenger crew in 1983, a plane in which Sally Ride became the first American woman in it. available.
At the end of 1985, together with Dr. Cleave on Atlantis, space released three satellites into orbit. He conducted bio-glass development tests for the 3M company and made an unforgettable moment when he threw waste water from a ship at sunset while flying high in over Houston, with the ship’s sun shining; the resulting stream was 15 miles long and was named “Cleave’s Comet” by Dr. Ride, the Mission Control contact for that flight.
In late January 1986, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing seven crew members, including two women on board, Christa McAuliffe and Judith Resnik. When the shuttle missions resumed in 1988, the first three missions had all-male crews until Dr. Cleave to ride back to Atlantis.
He said the mission, which was best known for the Magellan probe, was a breeze compared to his previous mission.
“The first day, he went out,” he said in a NASA oral history. “Then we got three days. So this is the plane where I did most of the photography.”
After his service in the space sector with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr. Cleave to Washington, DC, in 2000 to become NASA’s assistant administrator for advanced planning in the Office of Earth Science. As associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate from 2005 until his retirement in 2007, he oversaw research and science programs related to Earth, the sun and the universe.
“Maria is a force of nature with a passion for science, exploration and preservation of our planet,” said Bob Cabana, NASA’s associate administrator, in a statement.
He is survived by his sisters, Bobbie Cleave and Gertrude Carter.
Appointed Dr. Cleave on the third voyage, on the Columbia, but decided not to go; he was eager to start his environmental work, he said.
He told the oral history that “the more I think about it, the more I worry about how quickly the world is changing.”
“I mean, it’s only been four years and I looked down and there was just so much change,” he said, adding, “That’s not the time.”