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Mary Cleave, an astronaut who saw increasingly alarming views of the Earth\u2019s changing environment during two space shuttle missions in the 1980s, prompting her to work in climate research for NASA, died on Nov. 27 at her home in Annapolis, Md. She was 76.<\/p>\n
Her nephew Howard Carter said the cause was a stroke.<\/p>\n
In 1985, Dr. Cleave, an environmental engineer, flew aboard the Atlantis, helping to operate its robotic arm during other astronauts\u2019 spacewalks. Four years later, she joined a four-day mission on the same spacecraft when it sent the Magellan robotic space probe to Venus to map the planet\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n
What she saw from the shuttle informed her view of a rapidly deteriorating world.<\/p>\n
\u201cLooking at the Earth,\u201d she told the Annapolis newspaper The Capital this year, \u201cparticularly the Amazon rainforest, the amount of deforestation I could see, just in the five years between my two spaceflights down there, scared the hell out of me.\u201d<\/p>\n
And she saw other changes, she told a NASA oral history interviewer in 2002.<\/p>\n
\u201cCities were gray smudges; the gray smudges were getting bigger,\u201d she said. \u201cThe air looked dirtier, less trees, more roads, all those things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
After retiring as an astronaut in 1991, Dr. Cleave transferred to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. There, she managed a $43-million project that used a satellite sensor to collect ocean data showing the impact of global warming, in particular by measuring the abundance and distribution of phytoplankton. These microscopic plants and algae convert carbon dioxide into their cellular material and provide the basis of the marine food chain while producing oxygen.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get to study green slime on a global basis,\u201d she said in a speech to the Association for Women Geoscientists in 1997.<\/p>\n
It was something of a return to her undergraduate studies in biological sciences at Colorado State University.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy botany professor told me that lower plants are what make the world go \u2019round, and I think he was right,\u201d she said in a 2020 interview with the NASA International Space Apps Challenge, an event for coders, scientists and other innovators to use open data from the space agency to find solutions to problems on Earth and in space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI got recruited into engineering because of my ability to work with lower plants, which is a little bit backwards,\u201d she added. \u201cAnd it worked out really well for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mary Louise Cleave was born on Feb. 5, 1947, in Southampton, N.Y., and grew up 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 owned a summer camp.<\/p>\n
Mary built model airplanes as a child and at 14 used her babysitting money for flying lessons. She said she soloed at 16 and earned her pilot\u2019s license a year later. She thought about becoming a flight attendant, she said, but was too short to meet the height requirement.<\/p>\n
She earned a bachelor\u2019s degree from Colorado State in 1969 and attended Utah State University for postgraduate work, earning a master\u2019s in microbial ecology in 1973 and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering in 1979.<\/p>\n
While finishing her doctorate, she was working at the Utah Water Research Laboratory in Logan when a co-worker told her about a notice that NASA had put up in a local post soliciting scientists and engineers to join the shuttle program, which had not yet sent its first mission into space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cHe came back to the lab and he said, \u2018You\u2019re the only engineer I know that\u2019s crazy enough to want to do something like that,\u2019\u201d she said in the oral history, \u201cbecause I was always liking to do crazy things, ski too fast, among other things.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was chosen for the shuttle program in 1980. Her assignments including helping to design a better toilet for the craft and serving as a Mission Control communicator with the crew of the Challenger in 1983, a flight in which Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.<\/p>\n
In late 1985, with Dr. Cleave aboard the Atlantis, the spacecraft released three satellites into orbit. She did organic crystal growth tests for the 3M company and created an inadvertently 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 stretched for 15 miles and was named \u201cCleave\u2019s Comet\u201d by Dr. Ride, the Mission Control communicator for that flight.<\/p>\n
In late January 1986, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing its seven crew members, including the two women aboard, Christa McAuliffe and Judith Resnik. When shuttle missions resumed in 1988, the first three flights had all-male crews until Dr. Cleave was chosen to ride the Atlantis again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
She said that the mission, which was best known for deploying the Magellan, was a breeze compared with her first one.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst day, it\u2019s out of there,\u201d she said in the NASA oral history. \u201cThen we had three days. So that flight I got to do a lot more picture-taking.\u201d<\/p>\n
After her service in the astronaut corps and at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr. Cleave moved to Washington, D.C., in 2000 to be NASA\u2019s deputy associate administrator for advanced planning in the Office of Earth Science. As the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate from 2005 until she retired in 2007, she oversaw research and scientific programs concerning the Earth, the solar system and the universe.<\/p>\n
\u201cMary was a force of nature with a passion for science, exploration and caring for our home planet,\u201d Bob Cabana, NASA\u2019s associate administrator, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
She is survived by her sisters, Bobbie Cleave and Gertrude Carter.<\/p>\n
Dr. Cleave was assigned to a third shuttle flight, on the Columbia, but decided not to go; she had been anxious to start her environmental work, she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
She told the oral history that \u201cthe more I thought about it, the more it bothered me how fast the Earth is changing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, only four years and I was looking down and there were just huge changes,\u201d she said. adding, \u201cThat\u2019s really not time at all.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n