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About 10 percent of the 2,500 space scientists in the country are women. According to Gelinas, the early, crucial years of a female space scientist's education are the hardest, in terms of equitable access to the right information. "In high school, guidance counselors didn't encourage girls to take advanced courses," she remembers. "At my high school, you needed to double up on geometry and algebra II in your sophomore year in order to take calculus later on. This was like a secret that guidance counselors only told certain students. The girls who had older siblings found this out from them, but if you didn't have an older sibling, you were out of luck."

She notes she had five or six really close female friends in high school, and they all took advanced math and science classes. "I'm the only one who ended up in science. That's gotta make you wonder," she says.

By college, life gets easier. "You still get cases where you'll have an older male professor who will make a practice of only talking seriously to male students, or who won't take your questions seriously. But it's gotten to the point where it's so unusual that you really notice that it's happening. And actually, I've experienced the opposite problem more frequently, where professors are so conscious of not talking down to you that they sometimes assume you know more than you do."

There are just a few strong teaching strains in space science. Most rocket scientists descend from either John Winkler, who recently retired from the University of Minnesota, from James Van Allen, retired from the University of Iowa, or from Kinsey Anderson, who teaches at UC Berkeley. "Last year there was a retirement dinner for John Winkler," says Lynch, "and at some point, someone asked all of John's students to stand up, and then all of John's students' students, and pretty much 75 percent of the room was standing." Gelinas is fourth-generation Winkler, having studied with Lynch, who studied with Roger Arnoldy, director of the UNH Space Science Center, who studied with Winkler. At UNH, there are also second- and third-generation Anderson descendants.

Lynch, right, hoods Gelinas at the May 1999 commencement ceremony.

Lynch got her B.A. in physics at Washington University as a ROTC scholar. After graduation, she served in the Air Force for four years, working at the geophysics lab at Hanscom Air Force Base. She got her master's and Ph.D. at UNH, working on sounding rockets. "Roger Arnoldy is well-known for getting his graduate students through," she explains, "which is why I wanted to come to UNH." Also, her husband, Tim Smith, is a research scientist in computational physics, and they knew the Boston area would be a good place to look for work. Tim now works at MIT, and they are raising their two sons in Durham.

Sounding rockets are one-time research projects that, unlike satellites, travel through space for only about 20 minutes. "Depending on the speed you make it fly, or the angle you set it on, you can make it go into orbit or have it come back down," explains Lynch. They're not particularly large—width-wise, you could almost get your arms around one, and on the launch pad, they're about 40 feet tall. It takes about three and a half to four years to build one from design to launch, and to integrate the payload on a NASA-supplied rocket. Last winter, UNH launched three. One of them was Lynch's, which was launched from Poker Flat, Alaska, into the ionosphere to gather data about the structure and dynamics of the aurora borealis, or the Northern Lights.

Scientists who study the ionosphere are studying plasma particle physics, and plasma makes up most of the universe. "Basically, 99 percent of the universe is plasma, and most of the rest is dust," says Lynch. "The Northern Lights are like a local lab for plasma physics, for studying how electromagnetic forces operate on matter."

The technical definition of the ionosphere is an electrically conducting set of layers of the Earth's atmosphere, extending from altitudes of 30 to 250 miles, caused by ionization of rarefied atmospheric gases by incident solar radiation. But basically it's a region above our atmosphere—the air we breathe—where particles are ionized by sunlight. It's a cold, rarified atmosphere, and the physical laws that control this environment are called electromagnetics.

"Studying the Northern Lights is certainly important in understanding star formation and galaxy formation," says Lynch, "but I like it because it's fundamental physics, and very elegant mathematics. And because it's really pretty."

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