Balancing career, family life takes MIT's Zuber to Mars

CAMBRIDGE -- By the way she strides across the room at Harvest restaurant, cellphone in hand and a no-nonsense look on her face, you can tell that Maria Zuber is on a tight schedule, and no wonder.

As head of the Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences, she's the first woman to lead any department at MIT; as senior research scientist with NASA's Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics, she helped map Mars and made four trips last month to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to assist the team in charge of the twin rover landings on Mars.

There's more. She's preparing for the May launch of a satellite with laser-ranging instruments to make the first map of Mercury, and she's juggling responsibilities as a wife and mother of two sons, ages 14 and 11, at their home in Lexington. On Friday, she was named to the Presidential Commission on the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Vision. And don't bother trying to talk to her today, because she's flying to Pasadena to monitor the second rover as it explores a region of the Martian surface known as Meridiani Planum.

For a while the other day, Zuber returned to Earth long enough for a lunch of curried chicken and iced tea at Harvest, and she talked ardently about motherhood and galaxies, the existence of God and her affection for the music of the Hissyfits.

"It's a privilege to be an explorer," she says. "There have been times in my life, two in January, when you see something that nobody's seen before, and the thrill of discovery and knowing something no one else knows, even for a short period -- well, there's no risk in what we do, so you can't make comparisons, but it must have been what Columbus felt. People ask if I consider myself more like Galileo or Magellan, and I say neither. I'm just a little nerd who works all the time."

Scientists expect the second rover will range greater distances because -- as Zuber predicted based on her orbital experiments -- the site is free of huge rocks.

"A laser experiment I have in orbit around Mars measures how rough the surface is," she explains. "We measure temperature by day and by night, and based on how fast it cools, you can tell if it's rock. I was able to say we won't see rocks on this site, as we did on the other, and people said, `OK, the expert says no rocks.' But when it came down and there were no rocks, I said, `Cool. We got that one right.' "

Zuber, 45, grew up in Summit Hill, Pa., and by age 10 was building her own telescope, grinding her own lenses, and staying up late to watch everything about Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon.

In high school, she dreamed of a career as a space scientist, and after the first Viking craft landed, her father showed her a newspaper with a color photograph and said: "Well, we've been to Mars, so what are you going to do?"

"I said to him, `Just watch!' "

From Brown University, Zuber has a doctorate (1986) and a master's (1983) in geophysics, and from the University of Pennsylvania, an undergraduate degree in astrophysics (1980). The list of her published works runs six pages, single-space, and includes such esoterica as "The Role of Temperature-Dependent Viscosity and Surface Plates in Spherical Shell Models of Mantle Convection."

In some ways, she's more at home on Mars, 48 million miles away, than she is on Earth. "On Mars, we measure heights to 4 inches, so I can navigate Mars," Zuber says. "In Boston, so many streets are one-way that I get lost in Boston, but I'm fine on Mars."

The layering of rocks on Mars raises the possibility of sedimentation, and therefore water, she says. But does water on Mars translate to life?

"No, but on Earth, everywhere you have liquid water, you have life, so the fact that you have liquid water on Mars, that raises odds. Thirty years ago it was believed life occurs only with the right temperature and sunlight. Now we know of microbes living at the base of nuclear reactors that fuel themselves from nuclear waste. We thought life couldn't exist on Mars because the atmosphere is so thin ultraviolet radiation would fry everything. But there could be life that fuels itself from ultraviolet radiation."

After years of study and experimentation, does she expect to find life on Mars?

"No," she says, sipping iced tea, "because I'm conservative. For all of human history, we've believed ourselves special. Was it a miracle that a set of conditions allowed life to develop on Earth? I don't know. Our sun is special to us, but in all the galaxies, it's merely average. So, if life develops on Earth and also next door on Mars, then conditions for it to happen probably aren't so special. And if you look at all the stars and if only the teeniest fraction have planets at the right distance, then there's a lot of life, and maybe we don't matter as much as we thought."

For Zuber, a Roman Catholic, the balance between science and religion is delicate. "There has been a tendency to look at scientific discovery and say that only God can make a flower, but now it's done with genes. You don't need God to make a flower; your grad student down the hall can do it. And it's easy to look at every discovery and say it's one more thing that removes the need for God. But the opposite view is that the universe is more imaginative than anybody could have conceived, and just because you understand how things work, that doesn't mean there wasn't something that thought it all out."

So, then, does God exist?

"I don't know. I mean, I just don't know, because I don't know what God is. I can't touch God. I believe firmly in the need for morality and for ethics and for good in the world, and to the extent that there's something that makes people want to be good as opposed to want to be bad, I don't know if it's an entity or just appealing or what, but whatever it is, it's there."

Asked if there's a conflict between her faith and her science, she answers firmly.

"No. I'm more interested in moral and ethical questions than in rules made by some guy in Rome who's a human like I am. But then, if you're a scientist, you don't follow rules well. People who turn out to be good scientists are the kind of people always asking why, and I don't have patience with anybody who tells me not to ask why."

One indication of Zuber's hectic life is the miles she flies -- 130,000 last year.

And not every day is a success.

"I've lost experiments in space. There have been nights when I've gotten phone calls and someone says, `We think we lost your spacecraft.' Usually you get the craft back, but none of it fazes me. For me to get upset, it's got to be more than losing a spacecraft on the way to Mars."

Warned that women -- and men, too -- might envy her ability to balance career and personal life, she shrugs.

"I have a fantastic, supportive husband, a financial executive at Fidelity. Every once in a while I know when something's gone too far. I was gone three weekends in January, and when I came home my teenage son's pants were all too small. I once asked my sons if they'd prefer I stay home, and my older son said, `No, you're the only mom in my class who shoots lasers in space.' So it's not a total disadvantage."

Zuber never sought the appointment that made her the first woman to head a department at MIT. While on sabbatical last year at Harvard, she heard rumors and e-mailed the dean: "In the event I'm under consideration, let me make your life easier and tell you that I don't want to do that, because I'm involved in my science."

MIT responded by saying that she was the first choice and that the university was willing to work out an arrangement that would let her continue research.

Zuber no longer jogs 60 miles a week but keeps fit by rowing indoors and by bicycling from home to MIT and on 30-mile spins along a bike path in Lexington.

For relaxation, the woman who won the NASA Group Achievement Award for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Spacecraft Encounter of Asteroid 253 Mathilde is not above kicking off her shoes on Saturday morning to enjoy cartoons on television, especially "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Johnny Bravo."

But work is never far away, nor is the dream of seeing a human on Mars.

"I hope it's somebody I've trained," she says, "but as an explorer, what I never forget is how fortunate I am to have been born at the right time in the right place, which is America, where it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor. If you go to school and work hard, you can be whatever you want, and there are places on Earth where you can't do that."