It's a warm wednesday night in june and Lynette Gelinas is waiting for her turn in front of the microphone at Biddy Mulligan's, a well-worn Irish bar in an old mill in downtown Dover, N.H. It's open mike night, and Gelinas, who received her Ph.D. in physics from UNH in May, has been coming here nearly every Wednesday for a year to play her guitar, and to sing a variety of folk, country and blues songs. Tonight, she's going to try out Hal Ketchum's "Small Town Saturday Night."

There's an Elvis movie on the marquee sign
We've all seen at least three times
Everybody's broke, Bobby's got a buck
To put a dollar's worth of gas in his pickup truck.

We're going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end road
What's the hurry, son . . . where you gonna go?
We're gonna howl at the moon, shoot out the light
It's a small town Saturday night.

She's been playing guitar since high school, but the singing part is new. "My parents came for graduation, and I brought them here—they'd never heard me sing before," she says. "They couldn't believe it. They got to hear me sing, and saw me shake Al Gore's hand, all in the same weekend."

"It was a big weekend," she adds, laughing.

The guy sitting at the next table, a friend of a friend, has heard that she's moving to upstate New York, that she got a job at Cornell.

"What are you gonna be doing?" he asks.

She hesitates, and then blurts out, "I'm a rocket scientist."

"Oh yeah, so am I," he smirks, "and so is Curt here. We're all rocket scientists. The guy at the bar is a brain surgeon."

After 11 years at UNH, Lynette Gelinas is ready to move on. There really is a job at Cornell, a post-doctoral position where she will teach an advanced level space engineering course and work on various rocket projects. She insists that she was lucky to get the job, but Kristina Lynch '90G, '92G, associate research professor of physics at UNH and Gelinas's mentor, says Gelinas was offered three jobs without even applying for them, and Mike Kelley, her new boss at Cornell, says, "She's the best young experimental space physicist I have seen for a long time."

Kelley, engineering professor and associate dean for professional development at Cornell, wrote the book, literally, on plasma physics. His textbook, The Earth's Ionosphere: Plasma Physics and Electrodynamics, published in 1989, is a standard in the field. He was also the principal investigator on the SAL (Sudden Atom Layers) rocket project that carried Gelinas's detector to measure meteor dust, and Gelinas considers him a mentor as well.

Kelley feels like he's the lucky one. He points out that Gelinas helped him analyze the data from the SAL rocket project, and published results from the dust detector data. As a graduate student, she was invited to present a paper at an American Geophysical Union meeting, which Kelley says is very rare. "Basically, I think she's terrific," he says.

The space science community is small, and there is a lot of collaboration between university programs, so it is not unusual to have one space science program build a rocket that will carry experiments built by other space science programs into space. As Lynch says, "We all travel a lot."

Gelinas has been to the Netherlands and Puerto Rico on business, and, if you have a few minutes, she will tell you a long and very funny story about the International Dusty Plasma Conference that was held in Goa, outside Bombay, India. "The brand new hotel that was supposed to host the conference wasn't finished because of the monsoons, so it was held in a collection of beach huts," she says. "They kept losing electricity, so we'd be reading papers and the lights would be flickering. And for the poster session, we had to nail our research to palm trees."

The walls of Gelinas's cubicle in Morse Hall are filled with pictures of cats. She has three, Wilbur, Charlotte and Duncan. "I wanted to be a vet for about a minute when I was a kid, until I found out that you had to dissect cats," she laughs. She got Wilbur and Charlotte from the Humane Society when they were 6 weeks old. Neither have tails. Wilbur is all black and weighs 17 pounds. "Basically, he's a sphere," Gelinas notes. In her dissertation acknowledgements, she thanks them for being silly, for sitting in her lap, and for not asking her any hard questions.

Buried among the feline photos is a xeroxed copy of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "A Psalm of Life," which reads, in part:

Life is real—life is earnest—
And the grave is not its goal:
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

"I discovered the poem through Suzy Burke, a folk singer who put it to music," she explains. When asked why it is on her wall, she shrugs, "I just like it."

Also from her dissertation acknowledgements: "I appreciate all the offers of dust that I've received over the years, but I'd like to remind everyone that I'm only in the market for real 'space dust,' not the stuff that is all over the living room."

"I really feel like I've got to come up with a different phrase," Gelinas says, speculating on how to successfully answer the 'So, what do you do?' question. Especially when your profession is rocket science, commonly stereotyped as one of the most difficult jobs there is. "If I just say, 'I'm a scientist,' that seems to stop the conversation, too. Most people don't know what to answer. What are they going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I've analyzed rocket data, too?'"

Kristina Lynch, having had more time to practice, has a simple answer: she just says, "I study the Northern Lights." But the fact is that both women were drawn to the profession because of its difficulty. "Most research physicists get where they are in one of two ways: through astrophysics—wanting to study the stars and the moon—or through Radio Shack—wanting to mess around with electronics," Lynch explains. "As a kid, I was really fascinated with space, although I've been getting lower and lower in altitude ever since. But once I got to high school, the challenge of physics was what interested me. I liked it because it was hard."

Gelinas agrees. Her father is a mechanical engineer and designs printing presses. When Gelinas was a child, he would occasionally take her to work with him and let her draw circles on the CAD stations. "In high school, I really liked the difficulty of physics, of how you'd work for a long time and then you'd all of a sudden understand something," she says. "There is a real adrenaline rush in that. It was like an epiphany: 'Hey, I really can do this, can't I?'"

Gelinas began her undergraduate career at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she struggled. "At RPI, every kid in the school is taking introductory physics, and it's kind of a 'sink or swim' atmosphere. I was getting Bs and Cs, and I knew that wasn't good enough for graduate school. So I needed to go somewhere where I would get more personal attention. My dad used to commute to New Hampshire on business a lot, so I was familiar with UNH through him. UNH has smaller classes, and a less competitive atmosphere. It immediately felt so much better."

In general, UNH space science students get to help a professor design, build and launch an instrument into space, and then analyze the data. But there's usually hands-on research in the education of UNH's other science and engineering students, as well. Gelinas first started building hardware as an undergraduate in nuclear physics. She earned a master's degree in nuclear physics, and began her Ph.D. work there. "I was having so much fun in the lab," she remembers. "I was building scintillators, which measure particles with photon detectors. That's your apprenticeship. Students build stuff. That's how you know what will work once you become a real scientist."

Eventually she realized she wasn't really interested in the physics part of nuclear physics. She answered Lynch's advertisement for a student to work on a dust detector for a sounding rocket, and that project became her dissertation.

"Lynette is a graduate student advisor's dream," says Lynch. "She already had a great work ethic when she came to me, and she had a lot of laboratory skills. I've really felt all along that I wasn't training her, but that we were working together."

Gelinas sees it differently. "She was the one that I went to with any dumb, general questions, like 'Can I do this?' or 'Who would I talk to about this?' She really guided me through getting my dissertation done, and told me how to go about designing the detector." And it was Lynch who advised her on the less scientific but equally tricky issue of finding a job in a male-dominated field. "She encouraged me to ask what the atmosphere is like for women when I was preparing to interview for jobs. She didn't want me to be in an environment where I would be the token woman. She told me, 'You want to go somewhere where they want a rocket scientist.'"

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 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."

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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