12 Facts About JPL

In 1954, JPL teamed up with Wernher von Braun's engineers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, to propose orbiting a satellite during the International Geophysical Year.

JPL was transferred to NASA in December 1958, becoming the agency's primary planetary spacecraft center.

JPL engineers designed and operated Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon that prepared the way for Apollo.

JPL led the way in interplanetary exploration with the Mariner missions to Venus, Mars, and Mercury.

In 1998, JPL opened the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA.

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In 1961, JPL hired Dana Ulery as the first female engineer to work alongside male engineers as part of the Ranger and Mariner mission tracking teams.

JPL has been recognized four times by the Space Foundation: with the Douglas S Morrow Public Outreach Award, which is given annually to an individual or organization that has made significant contributions to public awareness of space programs, in 1998; and with the John L "Jack" Swigert, Jr.

When it was founded, JPL's site was immediately west of a rocky flood-plain – the Arroyo Seco riverbed – above the Devil's Gate dam in the northwestern panhandle of the city of Pasadena in Southern California, near Los Angeles.

JPL offers research, internship and fellowship opportunities in the summer and throughout the year to high school through postdoctoral and faculty students.

JPL created the NASA Museum Alliance in 2003 out of a desire to provide museums, planetariums, visitor centers and other kinds of informal educators with exhibit materials, professional development and information related to the then-upcoming landings of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

JPL is a federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from NASA.

JPL Advanced Projects Design Team, known as Team X, is an interdisciplinary team of engineers that utilizes "concurrent engineering methodologies to complete rapid design, analysis and evaluation of mission concept designs".