page_title: List of Puerto Rican scientists and inventors
section_title: Rocket scientist
hierarchical_section_title: List of Puerto Rican scientists and inventors / Rocket scientist
caption_attribution_description: English: Lissette Martinez
context_page_description: Before Christopher Columbus and the Spanish Conquistadors landed on the island of "Borikén", the Tainos who inhabited the island depended on their astronomical observations for the cultivation of their crops.
  In 1581, Juan Ponce de León II, the grandson of the Conquistador Juan Ponce de León, studied an eclipse and its effects on the island and was able to establish the exact geographical coordinates of San Juan with his observations.
  During the 19th century the economies of many countries in the world suffered from the spread of crop failures. Puerto Rico, whose economy depended heavily on its agriculture, felt the effects of some of the crop diseases. Scientists such as Agustín Stahl, Fermín Tangüis and Fernando López Tuero conducted investigations and experiments in the fields of agriculture, botany, ethnology and zoology. The findings of their investigations helped Puerto Rico's agricultural industry.
  With the advances in medical technologies and the coming of the Space Age of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans have expanded their horizons and have made many contributions in various scientific fields, among them the fields of aerospace and medicine.
context_section_description: Lissette Martinez is an electrical engineer and rocket scientist. Martinez is the lead electrical engineer for the Space Experiment Module program at the Wallops Flight Facility located in Virginia which is part of NASA's Goddard Flight Facility. She is responsible for providing electrical engineering support to Code 870 Space Experiment Module (SEM) program.  She also is responsible for the testing of ground and flight hardware. Martinez works with students around the world, helping them with science experiments that will actually ride along on Space Shuttle missions and blast into space. Martinez was a member of the team that launched a rocket from White Sands, New Mexico to gather information on the Hale-Bopp Comet in 1999.  She was featured in the November 2002 issue of Latina magazine.
caption: Lissette Martinez
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