A homegrown hero was in town last week hoping to point young students to lives of scientific discovery.

Emsworth native Mike Fincke arrived from Houston, Texas, to visit several schools, including the Word of God Elementary School in Swissvale.

"I came to let them know that their dreams can come true," he said after his presentation. "That's a great honor for me."

A 1985 Sewickley Academy graduate, Fincke finished degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University by 1990. Today he serves as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and works for NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas.

On April 19, 2004, Fincke's rocket took off from Kazakhstan for the International Space Station making him, at 37, the youngest man to live and work on the orbiting research center. He returned to earth Oct. 23.

Last Friday, at Word of Life, about 300 youngsters seated around the school's cafeteria punctuated his presentation with "wow!" and "ooh!" as they watched a DVD recording of his adventure.

"We were able to see Mount Kilimanjaro," Fincke said, gesturing toward a splat of brown earth surrounded by cloudy fluff and dotted in the center with an oblong spot of white snow.

Before that, the screen showed the light-blue meanders of the Congo River across forest green equatorial Africa and the snow-streaked tops of the Andes Mountains.

At one point, the screen showed Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka huddled in a narrow control room, looking downward toward a corner of the screen.

"Wait a minute," said Fincke to the pupils watching. "That sounds like a baby crying."

On June 18, in the middle of the mission, Fincke's wife, Renita, had the couple's second child, Tarali.

Fincke told the children it was a hardship to be away from his family, which includes a son, Chandra, 3. So, in order for him to hear the birth, his wife had someone call him via cell phone from the delivery room.

In a later telephone interview, Fincke said his work in space included four space walks to make repairs, such as getting the power supply to the station's gyroscope back on line, and to participate in several experiments.

A major piece of research involved connecting the two men to an ultrasound machine so that doctors on the ground could monitor loss of bone mass. When human beings exist in an environment of zero gravity, the result is that bone density lessens about 1 percent to 2 percent per month, said Fincke.

The human skeleton needs the stress of gravity to stay healthy, said Fincke. For the nearly seven months he and Padalka lived on the space station, diligent exercise was a must.

He said their findings will be published in a science journal and may some day lead to a breakthrough for people living with osteoporosis.