When was jpl founded

Still, the dream is perhaps a little bit nearer realization. In , the National Academy of Science doubled its annual budget. According to the official JPL website :. The U. In August , Frank Malina — one of the original "rocket boys" — headed a group that equipped an Ercoupe plane with rockets. The modified Ercoupe lifted off in half the normal distance.

Malina was named director. That same year, JPL started to develop guided missiles the Corporal. According to a JPL history :. The rocket reached an altitude of 70 kilometers almost 44 miles , a record at the time.

Launching a Corporal was quite an event. The fuel, the missiles, the launch equipment and the guidance equipment had to be transported separately. This made for convoys with dozens of trucks. The launch itself took lots of people and many hours of preparation.

JPL, which now employees around 6, people, would eventually become part of NASA and develop technologies that would help America win the Cold War, the arms race and the race to the moon. Troubled by the increasing use of rockets for weapons systems, Malina would leave America for France in , where he would join the United Nations and found the research journal Leonardo.

Forman would eventually go to work for Lockheed, contributing to both the Poseidon and Polaris sea-launched missile program. In , he died at his Pasadena home laboratory in a mysterious explosion, a rocket boy to the very end.

Call the Midwife. Muhammad Ali. The Latino Experience. Professor T UK. In Their Own Words. Variety Studio: Actors on Actors. PBS NewsHour. Halifax: Retribution. JPL's first planetary mission approval after Galileo's in was the approval of the Magellan radar mapping mission to Venus.

It was followed by approval of a series of low-cost planetary missions called "Planetary Observers," starting with Mars Observer. Like Magellan, Mars Observer was intended to fly on the space shuttle, but following the Challenger tragedy the spacecraft launched on a Titan III rocket in While Magellan enjoyed a very successful mission to map most of Venus' surface via radar, Mars Observer disappeared shortly before it was to go into orbit around Mars.

With Mars Observer went the Planetary Observer line of missions—no more were built. Magellan's approval built momentum for the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, a more complex and difficult political effort. But the sudden dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union over the next few years resulted in NASA's budget unexpectedly shrinking, and Congress threatened to terminate Cassini in and again in The international commitment to the mission saved it, though a budget cut forced the cancellation of Cassini's instrument scan platform — ironically increasing the mission's operating cost over its very long life.

The Cassini-Huygens mission left Earth on Oct. Huygens recorded the most distant planetary landing to date, and operated for 72 minutes on the moon's frozen surface before its batteries failed.

The Cassini orbiter continued to study Saturn, its rings and moons until Sept. Cassini circled Saturn for nearly half of the giant planet's Among its many discoveries was super-low temperature volcanism "cryovolcanism" on the tiny moon Enceladus, with the spacecraft even flying through a plume of gas and dust to sample it.

The plume contained chemicals that could fuel microbial life, exciting scientists interested in the search for life off Earth. Cassini flew through Saturn's rings and atmosphere during its final scientific campaign, returning data on their composition and structure until the moment it disintegrated.

The Mars Surveyor program eventually flew all of Mars Observer's experiments, though on smaller spacecraft.

The Mars Surveyor program came to an end in , after the failure of two missions launched in , the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. Mars Observer's loss also helped enable NASA to gain approval for another planetary mission program, known as Discovery.

The Discovery Program required NASA centers and university-based scientists to submit proposals to competitions that were to be held every few years. To get the program going, the first two Discovery missions were assigned.

JPL was awarded Mars Pathfinder. The Mars Pathfinder mission introduced what has become a powerful technology for planetary exploration: the planetary rover. The USSR had landed robotic rovers on the Moon, and it had tried to land a miniature rover on Mars in the s but had failed. Mars Pathfinder's micro-rover, named Sojourner, for abolitionist Sojourner Truth, in became the first robotic rover to explore the Red Planet. Mars Pathfinder also pioneered a new policy of releasing imagery to the public in almost real time, via the newly public World Wide Web.

Finally, Mars Pathfinder was also inexpensive, and justified an agency drive to reduce the cost of planetary missions even further. The two were equipped for robotic geology, looking for signs that liquid water having ever existed on the surface. They operated until and , respectively, roving nearly nearly 33 miles 53 kilometers between them. Among their many spectacular findings: at some time in Mars' deep past, water had flowed on the surface. NASA also approved a large orbiter to help discover suitable landing sites for a future Mars sample return project.

That orbiter mission became the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in The next rover, eventually named "Curiosity," was equipped for even more detailed investigation of Mars' ancient minerals and geology. It arrived on Mars on Aug. It was launched July 30, Instead of mineralogy, it will specialize in astrobiology and look specifically for signs of past life on Mars. Perseverance is also designed to collect and store rock samples on the Martian surface for retrieval by a future Mars sample return mission, formally approved by NASA in Perseverance also hosts a robotic helicopter named Ingenuity, a technology demonstration mission that will attempt powered flight on another planet.

The Stardust mission collected particles from comet Wild-2 in , while the Genesis mission returned some particles from the solar wind in The Deep Impact mission launched a kinetic impactor at Comet Tempel 1 to assess its structure and composition in Its mission was to measure martian seismic activity and the heat flow coming from Mars' interior.

JPL's next Discovery mission, Psyche, is being designed to explore the unusual main belt asteroid 16 Psyche during the late s. The InSight lander after placing its seismometer and heat probe instruments on the Martian surface in NASA used the successes of the Discovery program to initiate another program of competed missions, New Frontiers, focused on larger, higher cost efforts.

Unlike Galileo, which had focused much of its data gathering on the Jovian moons, Juno was focused solely on Jupiter. Juno entered a polar orbit on July 4, , and was still operating in In the decades it has led the nation's planetary exploration program, JPL has honed several skills and areas of innovation, including deep space navigation and communication, digital image processing, imaging systems, intelligent automated systems, instrument technology, microelectronics and more.

Digital compression algorithms JPL used to help return Galileo data from Jupiter are widely used in digital recording and transmission now. A JPL spacecraft, Deep Space 1, demonstrated the use of solar electric propulsion for interplanetary missions as well as autonomous space navigation. The Laboratory has also been active in developing CubeSat technology to reduce mission costs.

Its first planetary CubeSats, MarCO 1 and 2, were launched with the InSight mission to Mars and provided data relay services during the probe's landing. Skip to main content. About JPL. Engage With JPL. JPL also led the Mars Pathfinder mission, which placed a rover and a lander on the Red Planet in , and Mars Global Surveyor, which studied the planet from orbit from through The lab's Mars Odyssey orbiter launched in and remains operational today.

Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in , but Opportunity is still going strong and has driven more than a marathon's worth of distance on Mars. JPL's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in and continues to study the Red Planet from above, providing details about the planet's weather and features.

And in , the Phoenix lander confirmed the presence of water ice just below the Martian surface near the planet's north pole. Additionally, the Mars InSight lander is expected to launch in to study the interior of the Red Planet. Not all of JPL's Mars efforts have been successful. For instance, contact was lost with Mars Observer in , shortly before it was slated to enter orbit.

That's why missions often rely on existing ideas and hardware from previous trips to the red planet. According to Cook, the upcoming Mars rover, for instance, will utilize the a spare heat shield from the Curiosity mission. JPL has also sent many probes beyond Mars. Two of the most famous are the lab's twin Voyager spacecraft , which launched in to study Jupiter, Saturn and their moons. The probes achieved their initial goals, then kept on going, checking out Uranus and Neptune on their way toward interstellar space.

Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in and Voyager 1 should reach there in the next few years. JPL's Galileo probe also studied Jupiter, entering orbit around the solar system's largest planet in and making observations for the next eight years. Cassini, which launched toward the Saturn system in , sent data and images home until , when the probe was deliberately hurled into Saturn on the off chance it might crash into and contaminate an icy moon such as Enceladus.

One of Cassini's most famous findings was seeing water spurting in dozens of geysers from the moon's surface. The lab has also led or participated in missions to study comets and asteroids. One such effort was Stardust, which collected particles from the tail of Comet Wild-2 in and returned them to Earth. And JPL's Dawn spacecraft orbited Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, before heading off to study the belt's biggest body, the dwarf planet Ceres. JPL also keeps its eyes on Earth.

According to Jason Craig, who works on visualization for JPL, nearly a third of the lab's budget is spent studying our own pale blue dot.