Mary Louise Cleave

Born: 1947

Died: 2023

Country of Birth: USA

Nationality: USA

Ethnicity: White

Colorado State University BS Biological Sciences 1969; Utah State University MS Microbial Ecology 1975 & PhD Civil & Environmental Engineering 1979

"“For me, space flight was great, but it was gravy on top of getting to fly in great airplanes,” (cnn.com); "Looking at the Earth, particularly the Amazon rainforest, the amount of deforestation I could see, just in the five years between my two space flights down there, scared the hell out of me." (wikipedia); "They couldn't fit me in a spacesuit because I was too small," said Cleave in a 2002 NASA oral history interview. "So I was a flight engineer on that flight, and I flew the arm. That was, for me, a real disappointment when I found out I couldn't go [out on an] EVA [extravehicular activity], but I was happy with how it came out." (space.com); "I did five different crystal experiments for them [3M Company while on 1st space flight], of which four I had to sign a proprietary agreement on," said Cleave. "But the fifth one was an organic compound that conducted electricity. So even back then, they were thinking about making organic compounds that you could use as a chip, at a molecular level. So it was interesting work." (space.com); "

— Mary Louise Cleave

Field of Study: Environmental Engineer; Astronaut

Institution/Corporation: NASA

Degrees & Memberships: Member: Society for Professional Engineers, Association of Space Explorers, Women in Aerospace, Tri Beta, Beta Beta Beta, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi

Awards: 2 NASA space flight Medals; 2 NASA Exceptional Service Medals; Flight Achievement Award, American Astronautical Society; NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal; NASA Engineer of the Year; 1995 was featured on a postage stamp in Azerbaijan; 2002 Maryland Women's Hall of Fame; 2010 Long Island Air & Space Hall of Fame

Achievements: 1989 became the first woman to fly on a space shuttle mission after the Challenger disaster; 1991 took a role at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland working on a project called SeaWiFS, an ocean-monitoring sensor that measured global vegetation; 1971-1980 while working at Utah Water Research Lab her research included work on the productivity of the algal component of cold desert soil crusts in the Great Basin Desert south of Snowville, Utah; algal removal with intermittent sand filtration and prediction of minimum river flow necessary to maintain certain game fish and the effects of increased salinity and oil shale leachates on freshwater phytoplankton productivity; worked on the deployment of the Magellan Venus exploration spacecraft, the first planetary probe to be deployed from a space shuttle;