SeaWiFS: The end of a remarkable mission
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - 15:36
in Earth & Climate
Mary Cleave left the NASA astronaut corps in the early 1990s to make a rare jump from human spaceflight to Earth science. She was going to work on an upcoming mission to measure gradations in ocean color something she had actually seen from low-Earth orbit with her own eyes. From space, differing densities of phytoplankton and algae and floating bits of plant life reveal themselves as so many blues and greens. For Cleave, a former environmental engineer, the attraction was simple.