Women Are From Mars Isn't that. .. Sue Smrekar?

hen Dr. Suzanne Smrekar was a shldent at Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine, she rarely visited the school observatory or gazed at the stars. Today, she rarely takes her eyesoffthem especially the red one low on the western horizon: Mars.

Farmington native Smrekar, 37, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, spent most of 1999 with her eyes - and scientific high hopes - turned toward the Red Planet, as chief scientist for Deep Space Two, twin high-tech probes that were part of the Mars Polar Lander Mission aimed at the icy wastes of our mysterious neighbor. In early December 1999, after a year's journey 157 million miles through the interplanetary darkness, the Polar Lander fell streaking through the thin air of Mars down toward the red dust of a late Martian autumn.

And then - silence.

Smrekar and her fellow NASA scientists were watching that night and are still waiting for word from Mars. "Maybe the Lander overturned, or maybe it was buried in deep dust. We have no way to know," she says,sadness and excitement both clear in her voice. "But it sure was a real adventure, wasn't it ?"

For Smrekar, the Mars Polar Lander carried a cargo of symbolic firsts.Polar Lander was the first NASA mission designed to record the actual sound of the Martian winds, the firstmeant to sample soil deep below another planet's surface - and the firstspace probe in which the project manager, chief engineer, and chief scientist, Smrekar herself, were all women. "I know of no other project with even just one woman in any of those positions, much less all three. But a NASA historian looked it up for us and confirmed it," she says."Sometimes it's important to have role models like that for all kids, I think, including girls."

Smrekar's own journey to the stars began firmly rooted in the Western mountains of Maine. Orphaned as a teenager, she grew up in the Rangeley Lakes region and in the nearby town of Poland. She attended Hebron Academy, where teachers remember her as an intense, upbeat, and outgoing student happiest when crunching numbers in math homework. At Brown University she tried anthropology, astronomy, and physics, " But they just didn't seem right for me, and then I took a summer internship in planetary geology, and that was a fun and dynamic group that made science come alive for me !"

Smrekar spent much of a year in New Mexico, dropping test probes into the desert from a rented skydivingplane and firing them into mesas from a 30-footmilitary cannon mounted on a

Yes, this Is rocket science. An Interview with Miline's own Dr. Sue Smrekar By Herbert Adams

Geophysics - the study ofhow the basic lawsofphysicsshape the geologyof earth took her to Southern Methodist University in Dallas for a Ph D in 1987 and postdoctoral wor~ at MIT sorting through the avalanche of data from the ASAfly-by of Yenus.

Since 1992, Smrekar's work at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab has concentrated on Earth's geological hot spots, like Hawaii and Tibet, where the unquiet Earth isstill at work. To read the rockbound record of Mars' hot spots, Smrekar proposed a dart-like device loaded with sensors shot into the surface from a descending spacecraft. Ideally, says Smrekar, "you could seed a planet with a dozen of them at one shot, and then just listen to them" - in a sense, cloaking the planet in a sensory fishnet. flatbed. "We had lots of problems," she laughs. "Our bombing skillsweren't great, and we couldn't find them in the desert afterwards."

The result was the twin Deep Space Two probes on the Polar Lander. Defined as "bullets with brains," the probes - each about an inch and a half in diameter and about as long as a Bic pen - were designed to withstand 400 mph impacts and temperatures of minus 184 degrees Farenheit deep in the Mart- . ian soil. "What happened to the Martian atmosphere? Where did Mars's water go? The layers in the polar regions might tell us why the Martian climate changed."

Unfortunately, the probes, like the Polar Lander, descended into silence. No data reveals ifthey even fired, "and we have no way to determine what hap-

they'll conclude when Martian winter comes soon. Will we ever find it someday? I certainly hope so!"she smiles. eanwhile, Smrekar's career remains on Terra Firma. "I have fond memories of Maine, a fabulous place to grow up," she says."I come back as often as two little kidsallow, every couple of years." She stillvisitsher family in the Lewiston area and hikes the Rangeley Lakesand Baxter State Park. Smrekar even misses Maine winters, and sometimes drives her children into the high Californian mountains, "just so they can see real snow." "In Portland I like the Old Port for Christmas shopping - a real treat that I like a lot." Home in Maine, Smrekar remembers reading RayBradbury's Martian Chronicles as a child and dreaming of being an astronaut. As a Rangeley student, she visited Organon, the laboratory of the controversial scientistWilhelm Reich, and was intrigued by his "rain making" skycannon mounted outside, pointed at the heavens. "These things piqued my interest in science and in inventing things, certainly,"she says."Asa kid growing up, you just never know."

Until the mystery of the Polar Lander's fate isfigured out, there are no plans for another mission to Mars - and scientist Smrekar has no dreams of going there herself. "No, I have little kids now, and I'm not in the big leagues anymore," she laughs. "But ifanyone offersme a ride on the Shuttle, boy, I'm going !"

Now and then, she admits, she pauses under the night skyand looks up at Mars, flashing red and far away, "and I think, 'Hey! I wonder what you did with my probes?'" ,&