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Lynette Gelinas's dust detector is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, just north of Puerto Rico.

"It's probably a fish house now," she says cheerfully.

Gelinas's research environment is the mesosphere, which is the layer of the atmosphere in between our atmosphere and the ionosphere. The mesosphere is composed of oxygen and nitrogen, like our atmosphere, but it also has a small number of plasma particles as well.

The theory behind Gelinas's dust detector is that the dust in the mesosphere is from meteors that burned up there. Of course, before her dust detector, no one was certain that there was dust in the mesosphere. "There have been models that predicted that dust was there, but no one had measured it," she explains. "Now that we have evidence, we can begin to think about what it's doing. There are now all these new questions to be answered."

The detector measured eight by three and a half inches and sat on top of the rocket. It was designed to collect and measure charged dust particles. "This is really, really small dust, measured in nanometers," Gelinas emphasizes, "and it's really hard to collect. But finding out how much is up there is important."

The sounding rocket that carried Gelinas's detector was launched 40 miles east of Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, where the Arecibo Observatory, a huge radar dish built in a sinkhole by the National Science Foundation and NASA, is operated by Cornell.

Gelinas spent a month in Puerto Rico preparing for the launch. She stayed in a beach condo, and went snorkeling every day. "I kept thinking to myself, 'Yeah, this graduate student life sure does suck,'" she says wryly. The launch took place at 8:09 p.m. on Feb. 19, 1998. A night launch was required because many of the detectors on the rocket were sensitive to light.

When the rocket launched successfully, the first hurdle was cleared. Then, it was a matter of waiting for the data to see if the dust detector actually worked. "Data is telemetered to the ground, to small radar dishes at the site," Gelinas explains. "Once the rocket disappears, you watch the radar dishes to follow its path."

As soon as she was able to read the strip charts, it was clear that the detector had worked. "I was so excited," she remembers. "I called Kristina and shouted, 'It worked!' She yelled back, 'It did?!'"

But, what if it hadn't?

"Well, let's just say it wouldn't have been a very good dissertation," she answers dryly.

When Lynch hooded Gelinas at graduation, it marked the end of Gelinas's apprenticeship, but the beginning of their professional relationship. They have already begun work on two different projects together. "I wish I had counted all the times I told someone to go ask Lynette when they had a question that I couldn't answer," Lynch says. "But as one of my colleagues said, now I can just say, 'Go e-mail Lynette.'"

At Cornell, Gelinas will be teaching a junior-level spacecraft design class. "I'll be explaining spacecraft systems, how to launch something, explaining different types of orbits, how you would get to Jupiter if you wanted to, that kind of thing," she says. She's excited, but a little apprehensive: she hasn't taught a class since she was a master's student.

"The thing is, I really just fell into space science," she says. "Out of high school, I applied to six different schools, and six different programs. If I had ended up at UConn, I'd probably be a mechanical engineer right now. Once I got here and it felt right, I just thought I'd see how far I could take it." ~

Anne Downey '95G is a free-lance writer who lives in Eliot, Maine.

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