14 Facts About NASA Ames

Ames Research Center, known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley.

NASA Ames is named in honor of Joseph Sweetman Ames, a physicist and one of the founding members of NACA.

NASA Ames was founded to conduct wind-tunnel research on the aerodynamics of propeller-driven aircraft; however, its role has expanded to encompass spaceflight and information technology.

NASA Ames develops tools for a safer, more efficient national airspace.

The very small NASA Ames satellite has proven that scientists can quickly design and launch a new class of inexpensive spacecraft—and conduct significant science.

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NASA Ames was a partner on the Mars Phoenix, a Mars Scout Program mission to send a high-latitude lander to Mars, deployed a robotic arm to dig trenches up to 1.

NASA Ames is a partner on the Mars Science Laboratory and its Curiosity rover, a next generation Mars rover to explore for signs of organics and complex molecules.

Customers outside NASA Ames have included the FAA, DOD, DHS, DOT, NTSB, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.

NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames operates several of the agency's most powerful supercomputers, including the petaflop-scale Pleiades, Aitken, and Electra systems.

In September 2009, Ames launched NEBULA as a fast and powerful Cloud Computing Platform to handle NASA's massive data sets that complied with security requirements.

NASA Ames was one of the first locations to conduct research on image processing of satellite-platform aerial photography.

NASA Ames Arc Jet Complex is an advanced thermophysics facility where sustained hypersonic- and hyperthermal testing of vehicular thermoprotective systems takes place under a variety of simulated flight- and re-entry conditions.

NASA Ames Exploration Center is a science museum and education center for NASA.

In 2010, scientists at the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at NASA Ames studied the aerodynamics of the Jabulani World Cup soccer ball, concluding that it tends to "knuckle under" at speeds of 45 to 50 miles per hour .