X-Nico

16 unusual facts about Jet Propulsion Laboratory


Angeles Crest 100 Mile Endurance Run

It finishes at Loma Alta Park in Altadena, CA, adjacent to the Devil's Gate Dam in La Cañada Flintridge, near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Anthrax Detection Device

The BSM-2000 is a Bacterial spore detection system developed by Universal Detection Technology in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that can detect Anthrax Spores in the air.

Army Ballistic Missile Agency

In March 1958, ABMA was placed under the new Army Ordnance Missile Command (AOMC) along with Redstone Arsenal, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, White Sands Proving Ground, and the Army Rocket and Guided Missile Agency (ARGMA).

Chien Wei-zang

He obtained a Ph.D. degree at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Prof. J.L. Synge in 1942, and then worked as a research associate in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Caltech.

EDRN

By leveraging technology development for planetary science at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the EDRN has been able to develop and deploy an infrastructure to support data sharing, knowledge management and collaborate research.

Eugene H. Trinh

He started with NASA in 1999, as a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Harvey Molotch

The couple had two children, Shana (born 1969), now with two children and living in Northern California and Noah (born 1972), now with two children and living in Boulder Colorado where he is on faculty at University of Colorado as hydrological scientist, as well as research scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Joseph Veverka

He was a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on the Mariner 9 project.

Meredith Gourdine

In 1960 he earned a doctorate in engineering from the California Institute of Technology working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1958-60.

Mostafa Chamran

He was then hired as a senior research staff scientist at Bell Laboratories and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1960s.

National Medal of Science

The first National Medal of Science was awarded on February 18, 1963, for the year 1962 by President John F. Kennedy to Theodore von Kármán for his work at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Primary Atomic Reference Clock in Space

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which contributed Flight Hardware Development

Redstone Arsenal

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology was an Army research operation at that time, years before NASA.

Robert L. Hurt

His work has been used by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Slava Turyshev

Slava G. Turyshev (Russian: Слава Турышев) is a Russian physicist now working in the US at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Syd Lieberman

He interviewed the principal scientists and engineers involved in the project, and was present in 2004 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to witness the historic landing.


84882 Table Mountain

Named for the discoverer's workplace Table Mountain Observatory, currently a NASA facility operated by the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which began operation as a Smithsonian Institution site in 1924.

Center for Detectors

Some presenters include Dr. Donald Hall of the University of Hawaii, Dr. Chris Packham of the University of Florida, Dr. Joss Bland-Hawthorn of the University of Sydney, Bruce Tromberg, of the University of California, Irvine, and Dr. Shouleh Nikzad, Dr. Michael Hoenk, and Bedabrata Pain of the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Donnellan Glacier

The glacier was named by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names in 2006 after Andrea Donnellan of the Satellite Geodesy and Geodynamics Systems Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, who was involved from the mid-1990s in research projects involving the use of GPS in studies of earth crustal deformation in Southern California and also in Antarctica.

Hiten

Edward Belbruno of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had been working for several years on numerically modelling low-energy (weak stability boundary) trajectories.

Low-energy transfer

Edward Belbruno and James Miller of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had heard of the failure, and helped to salvage the mission by developing a ballistic capture trajectory that would enable the main Hiten probe to itself enter lunar orbit.

Murphy's law

Arthur Bloch, in the first volume (1977) of his Murphy's Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG series, prints a letter that he received from George E. Nichols, a quality assurance manager with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Planetary geology

Major centers for planetary science research include the Lunar and Planetary Institute, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Planetary Science Institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, and Johnson Space Center.

Potentially hazardous object

For this reason NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory use the more practical measure of absolute magnitude (H).

Prem Chand Pandey

In the 1980s he was also a research associate at the NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, where he worked on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite and SEASAT programs.

Properties of water

According to Josh Willis, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the oceans absorb one thousand times more heat than the atmosphere (air) and are holding 80 to 90% of the heat of global warming.

Richard B. Hoover

He was co-investigator with David McKay (PI) of the NASA Johnson Space Center on the study of biomarkers and microfossils in meteorites, astromaterials and ancient terrestrial rocks, and collaborated with Kenneth Nealson (PI) from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the investigation of microbial extremophiles from some of the Earth's most hostile environments as related to the co-evolution of planets and biospheres.

Space Systems Laboratory

The Laboratory also has ties with the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, NASA Langley, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Air Force Research Laboratory, as well as the Departments of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T., and aerospace companies such as Draper, TRW, Lockheed-Martin, MDA and Hughes.

Surface-barrier transistor

On January 31, 1958, the United States first artificial Earth satellite was launched at Cape Canaveral in Florida, which was called Explorer 1, and was developed by the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Thiokol

1945: Charles Bartley, working for the nascent Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discovers the use of thiokol as a stabilizer in solid-fuel rockets.

When scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that Thiokol's polymers made ideal binders for solid rocket fuels, Thiokol moved into the new field, opening laboratories at Elkton, Maryland, and later production facilities at Elkton and at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.

WAC Corporal

When, in the words of former JPL director William Hayward Pickering, researchers "came along with this sounding rocket which really didn't fit the pattern" of "getting bigger as you went along", the rocket "was named after the Women’s Army Corps (WAC)".