Maria T. Zuber

INTERVIEWER: This is the 150th Anniversary Celebration interview with Professor Maria Zuber. And if you don't mind, I just got a hold of the Zuber Report, because of the announcement from the provost, yesterday. So I was going to ask you about that first. And then we can go back and kind of proceed. Is that OK with you?

ZUBER: That's OK. All right.

INTERVIEWER: OK. So can you give me a summary of the recommendations in the report?

ZUBER: OK. So the Zuber Report was commissioned by the provost and the chancellor to consider environmental activities at MIT. And so MIT has gained a lot of notoriety recently as a leader in energy. But it seems not to be at the tip of everyone's tongue when you raise the term of the environment.

And so I was asked to work with a group and to try to understand what we really have going on, in terms of the environment. And where it could go. And so we had representation on the group from all parts of the Institute. We had students who were fantastic. We talked to a lot of people, really, as many people as we could in the time available.

And what became apparent is that there is a great deal of interest in the environment at MIT, from the standpoint of engineering, science, social aspects, policy. But that it was like the let 1,000 flowers grow. It was distributed all over the place. And so what we thought is that, if we did nothing else other than to coalesce those activities into a handful of unifying concepts, that MIT's visibility in this area would grow.

Because all of the individual research efforts that we saw were really of the highest possible quality. And so we suggested some ideas in the report. We talked to students about how the environment, their access to environmental courses in the curriculum. And there wasn't a single place where you could go to try to understand what environmental courses there were. But our students, they're very savvy.

And so they managed to somehow navigate their way through the system, no matter how the information is set up. But it certainly would take individuals who had some desire to go into that area to really dig. And so we suggested some concepts for future study. And we suggested that the Institute, in particular, looked at the idea of sustainability.

And the interesting thing about sustainability and the environment is that, when you talk to different people, you get lots of different definitions about sustainability is. And no one really-- like, we talked to people in science and they would say, sustainability, that's engineering. But sustainability was something that, overwhelmingly, the students wanted to learn more about.

So we started a dialogue about what we saw sustainability to be. And where it should go. And it was interesting, because the group of people that was put together on the committee came from all over the Institute. And several of them, they felt a little bit unloved, because of all the attention going with energy.

And so I really, I was a little bit concerned about whether we could really get a report together that whole group would buy into. But actually, by the end of the process, everybody was so excited about the possibilities that existed for taking this idea forward that the entire committee asked me if they could all sign the transmittal letter to the provost and chancellor to underscore the depth of their support for moving forward on this.

The provost almost fainted when he saw the letter. But it was great. And so then there's been, now, there's follow-on work going on now by and Environmental Research Council, which we suggested be convened. And they're now getting into the implementation stage. And in fact, today, the day that we're filming, I spent the earlier part of the day on a campus-wide symposium on rethinking water.

And water was one of the ideas that we came up with that was critical to the environment. It was extremely important. It was a unifying principle. And something that I think we have a lot of work going on already, now, in water. But certainly by holding a symposium and getting people's ideas on the table, already there are ideas emerging for taking this forward.

INTERVIEWER: So you mentioned in your report a sort of description of programs at Michigan and Berkeley and Princeton and other places. Can you articulate what it is that MIT offers that would be kind of new and different in this area?

ZUBER: Well, some of these other schools, so these are all great schools, and they all have they all have great programs. And what we were able to divine from investigating the situation is, that in some cases, these programs had greater visibility because they had a school of the environment, or a center for the environment.

So it was essentially a location and a group of people who were coalesced in the same place. And in some cases, the level of effort of what was going on was actually substantially less than what MIT was doing. But it was just the way that it was nucleated. So I think what MIT brings to this is, that we have such depth in so many different areas. We're obviously, we're number one in every aspect of engineering and in science. And our social sciences and our humanities and the business and the economics, political science, all of these things we have just exceptional depth in.

And I think compared to anybody else, we're strong in every area. OK. And so when we get people together, we don't lack anything that the problem needs. So this is, you know the study of the environment, it's a complex system. And not only is the interplay in different parts of the environment systems complex, but trying to figure out what to do about it, because it requires attitudes and behaviors of people to have to change in order to do it. So it becomes a sociology and a psychology problem, as well as a science and engineering problem. And because we're so strong in all of those areas, I think that we can really go after those problems.

Another thing that I think we bring to the problem is, just that there's an attitude on this campus in anything that we do, that nothing is impossible. OK. I think it's being in a school that is grounded so strongly in engineering that, in engineering you have to find a solution. I mean, there isn't a problem where you don't find a solution. You have to figure out how to do something.

And so rather than park a problem in the corner, because you say that's too complicated to really go after, it's, instead, OK, well let's take this problem and we can't know everything about the problem, but let's pick a part of that we can get our arms around and make progress. And so it's great to be a place where you can't really be scared away from something, just because it's a big challenge. In fact, around here, those kinds of problems tend to attract people.

INTERVIEWER: And you move on now to this and Senior Energy and Environmental Board an MIT. Do you know what the nature of your work in that is going to be?

ZUBER: OK. So the Senior Energy and Environmental Board is a group of people, all of whom have, I think, some administrative responsibility here at the Institute, that is going to advise the provost on the environment initiative as it moves forward. And I think, really the idea of it is to assure that there is a synergy between the Energy Initiative and the Environment Initiative.

So when President Hockfield gave her inauguration speech, she actually mentioned energy and the environment in the speech. And so initially, the energy part of it took off. And I think the environment part is now catching up. So although, actually, I have to give Ernie Moniz and Bob Armstrong credit in the Energy Initiative, because they actually were incorporating environmental aspects into the Energy Initiative from the beginning, mostly related to climate issues and climate mitigation.

But as we move ahead, it's important to make sure that the two activities are synergizing in places where it makes sense to synergize. Or at least, not acting totally independently. So of course, there are parts of environmental studies that don't directly relate to the Energy Initiative. And those are interesting things to study in their own right, and they ought to be studied.

But in places where it makes sense to synergize, we ought to synergize. And so an example of that would be, when we talk about introducing new energy sources into the stream, we can come up for all with all these ideas and many ideas are being put forth. But for goodness sake, you don't want to create a bigger problem than you actually have.

So for example, if you talk about wind, you put up windmills and they change the wind stress at the surface of the earth. And how does that affect the micro-climate in an area? OK. When we talk about putting out solar panels, and of course, we're talking here at about doing things at a scale where they actually help energy. OK. So if we just do things at a very small scale so that you can charge your cellphone home or something, that's fine, but it doesn't really help the world's energy needs.

We actually have to think about scaling things up to the point where they really make an impact. So if we think about putting out lots of solar cells to collect solar energy and convert that to electricity, well, it changes the albedo of the Earth, which changes how much solar energy is absorbed, which, since they're dark, actually has the potential to heat up the Earth. And that might not be a good idea.

And so it's very important, when we think about these things, when we think about energy sources, that we also think about the environmental impacts. We also need to think about, more broadly, green engineering. When we think about engineering new parts, new devices, and we train our students in the fundamentals of engineering design, it just seemed to a lot of us that environmental consciousness ought to be a part of the design process.

Now green this, green that. It's a very popular word right now that gets used. And if you can do it, that's good, and there's all sorts of good reasons to do it. The question is can you afford to do it? Is it feasible to do in a cost effective way that a product can be sold? And it could be sold with a design that has the right quality that one needs?

And so it seems like there's a lot of potential to infuse that into our engineering programs. So in this board, we'll be looking for those synergies, and looking for places where we can assess ideas that are coming up, and maybe pop a few back on our own, as well.

INTERVIEWER: You sound excited.

ZUBER: Well, yeah, I am. And I have to say, in my office, my department has an office, I keep putting out magazines that I get in the grocery store about climate change, about environmental change, about energy. And I talk to, like, the faculty. I'll go in and I'll show them. And they'll say, Maria, you're preaching to the choir. And I say, no, I've got this at the grocery store. We're relevant. This is our moment here.

People tend to listen to us a lot, anyway, because we're from MIT. But this is a time and a place and problems that have huge societal interest. Not only just to a subset of the population, but to the whole world. And what a great privilege it is to be able to study these problems, and to forge a path forward, ourselves. But even more so, to provide the training for the students that are coming through here, who are the people who are really going to be inheriting this world and are going to have to solve these problems. So training them in a way that they can come up with the scientific, the technical, the policy questions, but also educating people in a way that they can be informed voters, I think, also, on these matters.

INTERVIEWER: Well, thank you. Let me turn now to the sort of more chronological look.

ZUBER: OK.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me where you were born and where you grew up?

ZUBER: OK. So I was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Let's see, the first few years I lived, I guess, in suburban Philadelphia. Really, adjacent to the campus of Ursinus College, which is a little private college in the suburbs. And then, my father was a state policeman, so we moved up closer to where he and my mother had grown up. And that was in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania. And it's a little coal town in Central Eastern Pennsylvania. It was the, I think, the first place, at least in Eastern Pennsylvania, where anthracite coal was first discovered in 1800s. So both of my grandfathers were coal miners.

INTERVIEWER: And you were the first person in your family to go to college, I understand?

ZUBER: I was the first person to go to college. And in fact, when I was in high school, my father thought that I should-- he thought, I mean, he was really proud that I was going to be the first person in the family to go to college. And he thought I should go to the local satellite campus for Penn State that was 15 miles away from the house.

And I applied for a Senatorial Scholarship from school that the State of Pennsylvania has some of these scholarships. And the senator's office called my father and said, she shouldn't be going to a satellite campus of Penn Station. She ought to go to the Ivy League. And just have her apply to one of the Ivy League schools.

And so I applied to the University of Pennsylvania, because they had a program there for students from small towns in Pennsylvania. And I got into Penn early. And then I didn't enter that program. I didn't want to go into that small communities program, because I wanted to get away from people from the small-- you don't want to be hanging out with other people, you know, the whole idea of going to school like that that's so diverse is to just see a whole different subsection of people. So I didn't enter that program. But I went to Penn. And that was good.

INTERVIEWER: I know that there's one experience from your childhood that really helped set you on the path that you were interested in. And it's around, I think, the moon landing?

ZUBER: Well, you know, that, yeah, that influenced me a great deal. That was defining. But I was hooked before then.

INTERVIEWER: How did you get hooked?

ZUBER: You know, I'm positive that it was genetically encoded into me. I mean, I was reading books about space from the time I could read. And actually, my mother tell stories about when they were doing the first rocket launches on TV and I was in my playpen, that I would just be jumping up and pointing to, not just the launch, but just sitting there, Mission Control. And I'd be jumping up and down and pointing.

And so I started-- I read everything in sight. And I started actually building telescopes when I was seven or eight. And the moon landing was when I was 10. And my parents let me stay up late to watch the first-- to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. And well, I knew that that was what I wanted to do.

And I never, never, ever, for a moment deviated from that. And I did it. I said I was going to do it, and I did. I mean, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I wanted to study space.

INTERVIEWER: How, when you got to Penn, how did you determined that that combination of geology an astrophysics was the right mix?

ZUBER: Oh, well, it was, so I majored in Astronomy and Astrophysics. And it was, actually, it was really, it only happened because I finished my major like a year early. And I got through all my coursework, and then I took an engineering class. I thought about-- I was thinking about graduate school. And I was trying to decide between Astronomy, Astrophysics, Engineering.

And then I took Geophysics because it had physics in it. I said, that's good, physics, I like physics, so I'll take Geophysics. And then I realized that I had so many basic science courses that I could actually get a Geology major in a year, because I had taken so many courses. So I just I picked that up the last year. And then when I applied to graduate school, I applied to astronomy departments, engineering departments, and geology departments. And then just took it from there.

INTERVIEWER: And why did you pick Brown?

ZUBER: Let's see. That's well, actually when I was an undergraduate at Penn, and you have to go see some advisor, the advisor says, oh, you should be applying to MIT for graduate school. You're a good student. You should think about MIT. And I remember saying, I don't want to go to any nerd school. I want to go to a nice Ivy League school with a good program so I can go to piano recitals at lunch, and I can go to lectures on novels. I don't want to go to any school with vector heads, you know?

And of course, I'm the biggest nerd there is this. I mean, I studied all the time. But that's what I thought. So I didn't actually ever apply to MIT. And my advisor was actually my high school teacher. He wanted me to apply to MIT. And I kind of said the same thing to him. So he was very disappointed. My undergraduate advisor was disappointed. But things fall out. Here I am.

INTERVIEWER: That advisor had the last laugh. Can you talk a little bit about that experience of seeing the Voyager images of Jupiter?

ZUBER: Ah, Voyager. Yeah. Well, I was in a bar and they had the images going by of the Voyager flyby of Jupiter. And they were showing the pictures of it. And it was really the first time any human had seen that in that way. I mean, you could see Jupiter through a telescope. And we actually had some pioneer images of Jupiter.

But what Voyager showed was just completely different. And it showed the moons. And I was looking at that. And I thought to myself, you know, you could make a killing. If nobody ever knew anything before and then you have information that no one else had, and you studied it, you could make a killing.

And you know, science has gotten very compartmentalized and very detailed, where, to go make an original contribution, I mean, it's very common in science to apply a reductionist approach, where you go in, you look at a system and you break it down.

And so, as you break it down, you keep looking at smaller and smaller parts of the system to try to characterize it. And so it seemed to me that you could really, really do things of big scope, if you just looked where no one looked before. And I was interested in, my interests were very broad. I mean, I loved space. I loved to hike. I'm one of these people who, I look out the window in a car and I'm fascinated. When I'm on an airplane, I always, always sit in a window seat. I love to look at the sky and the ground. I mean, I just draw huge amounts of inspiration out of looking at that.

And it occurred to me that, if you go and you look someplace no one's ever looked, you always make a discovery. You never don't make a discovery. And so it was actually that, that caused me to want to do graduate work in planetary science, as opposed to some of the other fields that I was thinking about.

But then when I went to graduate school, well, I was interested in that. But I somehow deviated. I got interested in a class of fluid dynamical problems with highly nonlinear viscous fluids. And I just, you now, I wound up writing a theoretical PhD thesis that didn't have a single data point in it. Just because I just was interested in the physics of the problem.

But I enjoyed it, because I owned it. You know, I just found something that I liked and I figured it out. And I enjoyed that. But then, I mean, I think, though really, that I'm a natural explorer, I think. And so when I finished my graduate work, I kind of always wanted to work for NASA. And so my fiancee, at that time, who is my husband now, he was getting his MBA at the Wharton School. And let's see, I think I want to say that again, because I said he had a PhD.

INTERVIEWER: Go ahead.

ZUBER: OK, so when I was finishing up my PhD, my fiance, who is now my husband, was finishing up his MBA at the Wharton School at Penn. And he said, give me five cities where you might get a job. And I gave him five cities. And he got a job offers in all five cities. And then I got all the positions I applied for, too, somehow. And he said, oh, well, you've always wanted to work for NASA so why don't we go to Washington and you take this post-doc at the Goddard Space Flight Center?

And they actually hired me because, the Goddard Space Flight Center, they had a very strong earth sciences group, and they were interested in getting into planetary sciences. And so they hired me to come in and assist them, or contribute to that. And they had just won an altimeter to go to Mars, a radar altimeter, that they were very excited about.

But not long after I got to Goddard, the Challenger exploded. And so it set the program back. So everything slipped. And when the mission that this radar altimeter was supposed to be on, when this slipped, the cost of the altimeter absolutely skyrocketed.

So on the spacecraft, there were a number of instruments. They just totally deselected some of the instruments and threw them off to get the cost down. And then for the altimeter, they decided to hold an open competition for whoever could come in with the best, cheap altimeter. So at that time, all the planets were being mapped with radars.

And when I had gotten down to Goddard, it was when Reagan was President, and it was in the Star Wars era. And they were putting a lot of money into space-based laser technology. And so it just occurred to me that, well, if you're putting $2 billion a year into space-based laser technology, there's probably something useful in it.

So I got my security clearance. And I went in with some other colleagues, all of whom were about my age. And we looked at the Star Wars laser technologies. And when you talk about classified systems, it's all power, pointing, stability, jitter. And so what you do is you just take all the specs and you've dumb them down until right below the classification level. And so then, they've done all the hard part.

So when they had this contest, we proposed a laser system. And in terms of performance, we blew the radars out of the water. And so my second year out of grad school, we won a $10 million instrument to go to Mars. And then ever since then, all the altimeters that have gone to the planets, until about two years ago, had all been lasers, and they've all been ours. So that was good.

And so that's what really kind of got things going for us. And I really got involved in that, because I had been doing models, some modeling of the planets, and I got frustrated, because there wasn't observations available to be able to test my theories. And so eventually you get to the point where you just, you'll go get them yourself. And that's what we did.

INTERVIEWER: And you spent four or five years at Johns Hopkins?

ZUBER: Probably not quite that long.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

ZUBER: Yeah. So I actually, I really enjoyed being at NASA a lot. OK. But when you have a job in a place like NASA, or any research lab, really, about the best you can ever do is spend half your time doing your research, and then you spend half your time doing, what I'll call, company business, in a way. And so at NASA it's monitoring contracts, or things like that.

And I decided I wanted to teach and work with students. So I asked the Goddard Space Flight Center if I could spend some time at Johns Hopkins and start working with some students? And they said, OK, you can do this as long as it's on your own time, and it's not part of your official duties. OK. So I did that.

I went there and I taught a course for a semester. And started work with some students up there. And then, you know, much as I loved NASA, I just felt like the half of my time I wanted to spend in education. I just drew so much energy out of being with students and working with students and talking about what I knew. You know, I mean, I spent my-- you have to realize, I spent my whole life reading books, and learning about space.

And you know, with students, you could just talk about that stuff, and they sit there, they're interested in it. And with me, that's, you know, I mean, it's not working it's just my hobby, right? And so, in fact, I tell all my students now, if you play your cards right, you'll never have to work. And so I feel like I still ever haven't ever really had a job.

And so then Johns Hopkins offered me a faculty position there. And I decided to take it, and still maintain an affiliation with NASA. But I actually gave my job talk at Johns Hopkins when I was eight months pregnant. And they hired me anyway. So go figure.

But I left, eight months pregnant, I left a permanent civil service job at NASA for an untenured faculty position at Johns Hopkins. And all these people were saying, aren't you worried about not getting tenure? And you know, I just said, well, no. Because if I don't get tenure I'll do something else. But when you have kids, you still do your best work. You don't do everything that you used to do. You can't make everybody happy and fulfill every request that people have. But you do your best stuff. And I thought my best stuff would probably be fine. And it worked out OK.

INTERVIEWER: How did you wind up making the move to MIT?

ZUBER: So I really liked Johns Hopkins. So when I went there, I realized that being at a university was really what I wanted to do. And I liked my colleagues in the department. And they were extremely supportive. And then, at Johns Hopkins, you don't get tenure there until the full professor level. And I was a nontenured associate professor. So I had some time to go, which was good, given that I had small kids.

But MIT called and said why don't you come and talk to us about a position? And I said, no. I said, no, I'm good. And then I went home and I told my husband at dinner. I says, oh, MIT call today. And he says, oh, well, you should go talk to them, because I've been in my job for 10 years or whatever it was and there is-- he really liked where he was, also. He was at Marriott, which is a very good financial company. And it's, in fact, one of the top financial companies in the Boston area. So if you leave, and you want to be at a top finance place, you have to go someplace else.

And I said, well, I don't know about this. And so MIT called me back then, and they said, well, you have to come and talk to us, because we would bring you here with tenure, and you're not tenured. So you have to come and talk to us.

INTERVIEWER: Well, that makes it more appealing.

ZUBER: Well, so I said, well, I'll come and give a talk, but it's not an interview. I don't want to interview for this position. So I went and gave a talk. And actually, I don't even think, it wasn't a really good talk, by my standards, because I kind of didn't want the job. OK.

And they called me up and they said, all right, well, we want to go out for letters, and we want to make you a tenured offer. And he said, it was Tom Jordan who was the Department Head, and he says, and you have to do this, because then Johns Hopkins would have to tenure you. So you have to do this. And so I went to talk to my department head at Johns Hopkins and I said, well MIT is talking about tenure.

And he kind of patted me on the head and said, all right, go back to the lab and just keep working and you'll be tenured here in several years. And so I called MIT back and I said, all right, go out for the letters. And then they went out for the letters. And then Johns Hopkins decided that they were going to go out for letters. And they went out for letters at the full professor level, because that's where you get tenure there.

And then MIT raised it up and offered me a full professorship. And that was really something, because it was, I would say, an aggressive offer. And I was afraid it wasn't going to work out at either place. But I'll tell you what. I have really never forgotten the fact that they took a risk when they hired me the way they did. And so I've thought about it at times as we've gone around.

And then, so a number of places then contacted me and says, oh, we didn't know you were available. And I said, well, I wasn't. I wasn't. So it was unplanned, I guess. But it turned out nice.

INTERVIEWER: With MIT did you have some of that residual feeling that you didn't want to be with all of the nerds?

ZUBER: Well, yes and no. Well, I think I told them, I said, look, the only reason I'm coming here is because you're offered me tenure. But you know, actually, when I took the position at Johns Hopkins, I was thinking, OK, is this what I want to do? Because I don't consider myself a person who just bounces around. I mean, I don't take a job to get the next job. I take a job with the idea that I'm going to accomplish what I'm going to accomplish. And so actually, it kind of went through my mind. OK, if I wasn't going to come Johns Hopkins, where would I like to be?

And the only place that I really thought had an attraction for me was MIT, because they were ranked number one in my field. And I just said, well, they'll never hire me, so I should just do this. And it's a great place. And I should be happy about it. So yeah. So when I came here, then I had the willies scared out of me, because I was showing up as a full professor. So people think you really something, you know?

And so when I came here I just says, OK, I just want to be average. OK. I just want to show up, if I can only be as good as the average professor at MIT, then I'll be extremely successful. And that was probably the thing that kept me going, because, you know, around this place, if she say you want to be the best, and then you look around, it can be dispiriting really quickly.

Because so many, most, if not all, you know, everybody here was all at the top of their class. And everybody can't be at the top. So if you go in and say you want to be as good as the average person, in a really good place, then it gives a much better, I think, model for success than coming into a place like this and saying you're going to be the best. And maybe you can. But you can be disappointed, too.

INTERVIEWER: So you had these expectations of what MIT was going to be like. Can you tell me a little bit about what you thought when you finally got here? How was it different, or how was it the same as you expected?

ZUBER: Oh, it was, OK. So one of the things that was surprising to me was, that I had been in good schools. I was at the University of Pennsylvania. I was at Brown. I was at Johns Hopkins. And all of these places have really top scholars at them. The thing that was surprising about MIT is just that the average was just so high.

And so as you walk around the campus, you know, any person that you look at, undergraduate, graduate student, faculty-- and I guess I think about it more from the standpoint of just the students that are walking around half asleep with their hair disheveled-- every single one of those people is just the most remarkable success story. I mean, to wind up at MIT, things have to just go remarkably right. OK.

And so just be the overall quality of everybody, I thought, was a surprise to me. I mean, I knew I would find very, very smart people here. But it's everyone, everyone. And I mean, you've got to watch. You could be in line for the bank machine and the person next to you has just make remarkable, remarkable discoveries. So that was something that was surprising.

The other thing that surprised me-- and had I known it and realized it, I probably would have been at MIT long ago-- is just the breadth of the interests of people here. So the classic paradigm of the nerdy person who's at MIT, there are definitely people like that. But just the talent level of the students, I mean, they're athletes, and they're good athletes. They're really accomplished musicians and playwrights. And I mean, and students who come to MIT, they have to be very, very strong in science and mathematics.

But to have the other aspects of their being so highly developed, that they're so accomplished and in other areas, to me, was just a big surprise. And so you come here, I can still go to piano recitals, and poetry readings. It's just those things from the outside of MIT, they don't get the air play, but that community is very, very strong. And so I'm like, it's just how good MIT is at history and literature. It's fantastic that all of this is here.

INTERVIEWER: So now do you think that your high school adviser was right?

ZUBER: Boy, you hate to say that anyone in authority who had ever told you anything was right. Because I know nobody that I advise, I think, ever really listens to me that carefully. But I can only say, I'm happy I'm here.

INTERVIEWER: So when I look at your sort of list of areas of interest, I sort of have the same feeling as what you're talking about with the students. Because traditionally, astronomers are the ones who kind of study space. And geologists study earth science. And you're coming with a much more interdisciplinary kind of background, it seems to me. So with when you're looking at volcanoes in Iceland, or mapping the surface of Mars, or creating some scientific instruments, is there sort of a thread that unites all of these interests in your mind?

ZUBER: Well, I'd love to be able to tell you there was a plan. But I think what it was is that I just was so interested in so many different things that I just wanted to be involved in every part of the process. OK. I didn't want to be in charge of every part of the process, but I couldn't bear to analyze data from an instrument that I didn't understand.

And so actually, it started at Goddard, where, when I got the chance to do my first laser instrument, they wouldn't let me in the cleanroom because I wasn't qualified to be in the cleanroom. So I started taking all these courses to get all my engineering certifications. And just so I could go in the cleanroom when they were shooting the laser. That's a lot of fun. And so I took all these tests and I got all my engineering certifications. And then I felt like I really understood things.

So I really wanted to go from the point of having this idea of some aspect of science, that I wanted to solve a question, to deciding what measurement had to be made and what instrumentation was required to make it. And designing, not the best instrument, but one that could win a proposal, which is something very different. And then analyzing the data and then writing the papers to talk about it.

So actually, I was lucky in my career, actually, that-- well, unlucky and lucky. So the first instrument that I won, the spacecraft was lost three days before it got to Mars. And in the interim, I had written a proposal for this Department of Defense mission, where they wanted to test Star Wars sensors, and they couldn't test them in Earth Orbit, because of a treaty. So they decided to send the spacecraft to the moon.

And I wrote a proposal to be on the science team. And they had a laser instrument on it. And so people said, what do you want to be on this crummy Department of Defense mission for when you've got this fantastic instrument going to Mars? And I just went, because it's going to the moon, you know? I mean, you don't know. So then the spacecraft with the Mars instrument got lost.

And so we had this moon mission. And as soon as they got the first photon back from the moon to the spacecraft, the Defense Objective was finished. And the mission was called Clementine. It was being run by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. And so the leader of the mission, his name was Colonel Pedro Rustan, actually, he escaped from Cuba. Swam across Guantanamo Bay to a US ship. Defected, got a PhD in Lightening and joined the Air Force.

And he decided he wanted to map the whole moon. And so after they-- for the instrument I was working on, the laser system-- as soon as he got the photons back he came up to me he says, OK, this is your instrument. Come with me. Here's the computer where you send commands. Can you program?

And I says, a little. And he says, OK, you can program this instrument to do whatever you want, but just don't deal with any of these other files, because you might crash the spacecraft into the moon or something. So I was given this instrument to work with. And it had to be programed significantly to operate scientifically. And so I learned how to do all this stuff, just on the fly, really.

And it was great, because then I really didn't understand the whole process. And that was very important to me. And I feel like I've written better papers, because I've understood the data. But I've also felt like it's really helped me design other instruments. You know, I always say when you design, when you're going into a proposal competition, I always like to count, how many miracles do you need?

So how many big technological hurdles we have to get over? And so you figure out how many there are, how many there can be to get selected. And then you make sure you only have that many or less. And so by being a little bit broad, I think it's helped, actually.

INTERVIEWER: So despite the fact that you left NASA, you have to continued to do work there over the years. Can you talk a little bit about the projects that you've worked on?

ZUBER: Well, unlike many research programs of professors at universities, most of the research that I do is with big teams of people. So I really depend, very heavily, on the contributions of a whole lot of people. So I'm probably most recognized for the instrument investigations.

So the first one that actually came to pass was the Clementine mission, which we did the first global topography map of the moon. And did a very good gravity model of the near side, and a not so good gravity model of the far side. Because we never see the far side of the moon from Earth, you actually have to be in view of Earth to measure gravity at a planet. So you can make some inferences about what's going on in the back from the way the spacecraft gets bounced around on the front. And so we were able to make use of that.

But we did the first map of crustal thickness of the moon that was global, in extent, and which gave some idea of how much of the moon had melted early in its history. And that, actually, it that work that MIT hired me for. Then at Mars, well, that was the second time's the charm. So we sent an altimeter to Mars to measure the topography of that planet. And that was an instrument we designed ourselves. So the first one was lost.

And then well, we wanted to try to get it back. And of course, space missions, they're very expensive. And when you want to do a space mission, there's a lot more to it than just writing a proposal. So actually when the mission was lost, I actually spent a lot of time down on Capitol Hill trying to get funding put back in the budget to re-fly that mission, which then happened. So so we did that.

So we measured the topography of Mars, better then we know the topography of Earth. So that was a nice thing. And we also measured the gravity the planet very well. And Mars rotates nicely, so you can see the whole thing. So we measured the full planetary gravity field. And so did initial models of the interior structure of Mars.

We measured the topography so accurately, that on Mars-- well, Mars has an atmosphere, it has a carbon dioxide atmosphere-- and its orbit is more elliptical than Earth's orbit is, and it's tilted on its axis about the same amount as Earth. So it actually goes through seasons like the Earth goes through. And because the atmosphere is very thin, the seasons are actually more dramatic, in terms of how they change on the planet.

So it actually snow's dry ice on Mars in the winter hemisphere. And we were able to measure how deep the snow got from orbit with the satellite, before that measurement was made on Earth. So we published that paper in Science before the same measurement was made on Earth. I was pretty excited about that.

And actually, I thought the earth science community, that we were going to get a lot of push-back from them. And that I was going to be afraid to talk in front of my earth science colleagues about this sort of stuff. But actually, they just said, oh, no, this is great. We've got to play this up, because this is embarrassing. You're over making all these measurements at Mars, and we can't. And it was more of, it wasn't that you couldn't do it on Earth, it was just that the funding was available to go do these missions on Mars. And it wasn't for the Earth.

When you make certain measurements for Earth there's political things involved with it. So I said, well, maybe I'll do Earth someday. But I deviated from that. I won an altimeter on an asteroid mission. So it was called Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, which was 433 Eros, which is one of the largest near Earth asteroids. And the spacecraft orbited there.

So keeping a spacecraft in orbit around a big potato, 33 kilometers wide, is a very challenging thing, actually. And that was fun. Because that was a hard project to figure out how to keep a spacecraft in orbit. And so we measured the shape of the asteroid, and also measured the gravity field. So we were able to get at what the interior of the asteroid was like and how much it was broken apart. So that was the first real study like that, that had been done of an asteroid.

INTERVIEWER: And you discovered your own asteroid.

ZUBER: I didn't discover it. It was discovered for me. So if you discover, people who discover asteroids get to named them after whoever they want. So I am extremely honored. My asteroid was discovered Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, who also discovered the comets that hit Jupiter. So comet, Shoemaker Levy, that all of the pieces broke up and it hit Jupiter. So Gene the Father of Planetary Geology.

He was the world's expert on impact basins on the Earth. He did all the initial mapping of lunar craters on the moon. He trained the Apollo astronauts. And he had been on the Clementine mission, where I came on as like the junior, sub-junior person. They always pick a couple of people to come on and do all the work.

And in recognition of the work that I did, in terms of making discoveries at the moon, Gene and Carolyn-- I talked to Carolyn. Carolyn told me about this because the asteroid was "approved" with my name, after Gene had died. And she says, well, we were waiting for the perfect asteroid.

And so my asteroid is a Mars crosser. It crosses the orbit of Mars. And they picked that one for me because it might hit Mars someday, and make a crater. Not in our life times, of course. So to have to have Gene Shoemaker name an asteroid after me, that was actually one of the biggest honors that, I think, I've had. Because I have to have a great deal of professional respect for Gene. And for him to have thought I had done some good work really meant a lot to me. So that's about what I've done from asteroids so far.

We're sending a mission to Mercury called Messenger. And we haven't been to Mercury for decades. And Mercury is not that far away, actually. And the reason is, it's close to the sun. So first of all, it's hot and it's hard to get into orbit. So the Messenger mission was launched. And it takes a long time to get to Mercury, because what has to happen, if you think about the sun. If you're launching a spacecraft, the way you get into orbit around the a planet is you fly near it, and then you slow down the spacecraft enough so the planet's gravity field captures it. OK.