For astronaut Mark N. Brown, looking down on Earth from a space shuttle provides a unique perspective on how humanity is affecting the environment.
'When you fly in space and you go over Central America and South America and you see the jungles being burned and the smoke palls covering most of the country, you also see the smoke being blown out over the Atlantic Ocean in route to Europe and the rest of the world,' he said.
'It becomes quite clear the environment is not just the concern of some guy in his backyard, but it's everybody's concern.'
Appropriately enough, Brown, 39, and four crewmates are scheduled to take off aboard the shuttle Discovery this week to launch a $633 million environmental research satellite built to study Earth's protective ozone layer and other gases and processes affecting the atmosphere.
Brown, operating Discovery's 50-foot-long robot arm, is scheduled to launch the massive satellite on the third day of the mission.
'Depending on whom you listen to and what data you want to believe, the atmosphere may be in very big trouble right now,' he said. 'This payload will establish what the health of our atmosphere is today and give good indications as to what those trends are ... and where we'll be in 20 years.
'If there is a negative trend as everybody suspects, we're going to have to go back and change our way of life as an international community to start cleaning things up. With the data from the satellite, we'll have something concrete to point to that says this is where it is now and this is where you'll be in 20 years if you don't change your lifestyle.'
Brown first flew in space aboard the shuttle Columbia, which took off Aug. 8, 1989, to kick off a five-day military mission.
'There's a tremendous sense of frustration when you get back from your first space flight that you can't easily relate the visual experience to everybody else,' he said. 'We took a lot of photos and a lot of them turned out real well. (But) they just give you the initial feeling of what it really looks like from space.'
Along with launching UARS late this week, Brown also will be responsible for testing a Nikon camera equipped with digital sensors in place of film. Images taken with the camera can be radioed down to Earth.
'Any picture you can take with any lens on a 35mm camera I can take with this camera,' he said. 'In addition, with the laptop computer we'll have on orbit, I can take the digital image, crop it or enhance it and then send down selected images out of that.'
To show the potential of the new camera system, Brown described a picture he took during training.
'One of the photographs I took was of a guy just standing there and his arm was in the field of view,' he said. 'I cropped out just his wrist with his watch and was able to enhance the photograph so you could read his watch.'
Born Nov. 18, 1951, in Valparaiso, Ind., Brown graduated from Purdue University in 1973, earning a degree in aeronautical engineering. He later received a master's degree in astronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1980.
Married to the former Lynne A. Anderson of River Grove, Ill., Brown received his pilot wings at Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas, in 1974. He then was assigned to the 87th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base in Michigan, where he flew T-33 and F-106 jet aircraft.
In 1979, he transferred to the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, where he earned his master's degree.
Brown began working at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1980, participating in development of emergency procedures and serving as a flight activities officer for six space shuttle missions.
He was selected as a NASA astronaut in May 1984 and in December 1985, he was named to the crew of a military shuttle mission. But one month later, on Jan. 28, 1986, the shuttle Challenger was destroyed, grounding the nation's manned space program, and Brown's flight was canceled.
During NASA's recovery from the Challenger accident, Brown served as an astronaut member of the solid-fuel booster redesign team.
An avid outdoorsman who lists fishing, hiking, jogging and chess as his hobbies, Brown is the father of two children: Kristin Elizabeth, 9, and Karin Alison, 5.
