All articles tagged with #jpl
NASA’s Dragonfly, a $3.3‑billion nuclear-powered rotorcraft, will hop across Titan’s methane sky to sample its surface and investigate potential subsurface habitats for signs of life. Planned to launch in 2028 and perform a two‑hour descent to Titan’s surface in 2034, the mission represents one of NASA’s last large planetary explorations amid ongoing budget pressures and shifting priorities.
Curiosity stamps the letters JPL in Morse code on Martian terrain with its six aluminum wheels. Those repeating marks serve as a built‑in visual odometry reference, helping NASA's navigation software compare commanded wheel rotations with actual movement across difficult ground to detect wheel slip. The feature is an engineering convenience, not a sensor, designed to provide landmarks and scale while respecting the rover's mass and design limits.
JPL engineers used a “big bang” heater switch on Voyager 2 to keep its electronics and fuel lines warm, freeing enough RTG power to extend the mission by about a year, with a similar upgrade planned for Voyager 1.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover reveals wheel wear—holes and cracks—from nearly 14 years and about 32 km of driving, in a MAHLI image taken on Sol 4963 (July 23, 2026). NASA/JPL notes the wheels are holding up well despite rough Martian terrain as Curiosity continues to explore Gale Crater, having logged over 20 miles of travel in its long-running mission.
Facing an eight-and-a-half-hour delay to render a grayscale Mars image from Mariner 4’s numeric data, JPL engineers pasted the teletype strips on a wall and hand-colored them with Rembrandt pastels, creating a color image before the official photo was released; the result, while an improvised color-by-numbers, matched Mars’ hues surprisingly well and became a public-facing first close-up of another planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory revived four attitude-control hydrazine thrusters on Voyager 1 in 2017 after they had been idle since 1980, firing 10-millisecond pulses at a distance of about 21 billion kilometers to keep the spacecraft’s dish pointed at Earth. The 19-hour-35-minute signal lag meant there was no real-time control, so engineers reconstructed the dormant branch’s behavior from old records and code and used a spare trajectory-correction thruster set. The test, enabled by hardware redundancy, extended the probe’s life by a few years as power and aging continue to challenge the mission, underscoring how careful engineering and cross-generational knowledge keep deep-space hardware operational.
NASA's Voyager 1, launched in 1977, remains the farthest human-made object and still sends data from interstellar space. Its plutonium RTGs are decaying, so JPL is rationing power by turning off nonessential instruments and managing heaters to keep critical systems like the thruster lines warm. Signals take about 23 hours to travel from Voyager 1 to Earth, meaning a response would take a full day, and the team hopes to keep the mission alive into the 2030s while the golden record aboard continues to carry humanity's greetings into the cosmos.
NASA's ERNEST rover prototype, built by JPL, completed a 16-mile desert trek in Southern California, mostly autonomously, thanks to new wheels, an active suspension and AI-driven obstacle navigation. The seven-day test aims to inform future lunar and Martian rovers with greater range, speed and terrain flexibility than traditional six-wheel rocker-bogie designs.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1—roughly the size of a small car—still sails outward at about 17 km/s, now well beyond Pluto’s orbit at 166 AU. It communicates at light speed, with signals taking over 23 hours to reach Earth, while its power has dwindled to ~250 watts and only two instruments remain active. The mission has outlived its original four-year plan, outlasting most of its creators, and it carries the Golden Record as a lasting message as it drifts through interstellar space for billions of years.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is field-testing ERNEST, a compact autonomous rover designed to move faster across rugged terrain for future Moon and Mars missions. In a desert trial, ERNEST reached up to 0.6 mph and covered about 16 miles over roughly 37 hours, using mesh-wheeled propulsion, four steerable wheels, and two powered front joints to switch among gaits like squirming, wheel-walking, and obstacle-climbing. Trained with reinforcement learning, the rover can navigate autonomously and even drive sideways, aiming to reach previously inaccessible regions on upcoming missions.
NASA's JPL is field-testing ERNEST, an Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain, to refine mobility and autonomous navigation for future long-range lunar and Mars missions. In March 2026 in the Colorado Desert, the four-wheeled prototype drove about 16 miles (37 hours) with minimal intervention, using active suspension (with a passive mode) and a gimbaled front to handle rugged terrain. The rover is being trained with reinforcement learning in a high-fidelity simulator before autonomous, longer-range lunar testing, aiming to reach speeds far beyond current rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity.
JPL’s Open House is back for October 10–11, 2026 in Pasadena. Admission is free but requires timed tickets, which go on sale August 29 at 9 a.m.; you can reserve up to five tickets and must choose a time slot and list attendees with IDs checked at the door. If tickets sell out, limited group/individual tours are released monthly. Visitors can see mission control, fabrication facilities, the machine shop, and robotics research while learning about Mars rover and space-probe work. Caltech manages JPL, which has faced funding pressures and a 2028 management-contract recompetition.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory invites the public to Explore JPL, a free two-day open house on Oct. 10–11 (9:30 a.m.–4 p.m. PDT) featuring tours of iconic facilities and four themes: Missions That Changed the World, Moon to Mars, In Flight, and Makerspace. Tickets are scarce and distributed online on a first-come, first-served basis for timed slots (up to five tickets per request). Attendees age 18+ must show government ID; a long list of items isn’t allowed and bags are restricted, though parking is free. Highlights include the Space Flight Operations Facility, the Spacecraft Assembly Facility, robotics research, and full-scale models of Perseverance, Voyager, and Galileo.
NASA announced it will solicit bids to operate the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when Caltech's 68-year management contract ends in 2028, marking the biggest leadership shakeup in JPL's history. As a federally funded R&D center, JPL has faced cost pressures amid a booming private space sector, and NASA seeks a cheaper operator—potential bidders include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and universities such as Caltech. The change could preserve JPL's robotic-mission legacy while shifting efficiency and work culture, though funding and missions remain controlled by Congress and NASA HQ.
NASA will competitively bid the management and operation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Caltech-run lab that has operated under a long-standing arrangement since 1958. The move, tied to NASA’s broader realignment and focus on faster, more cost-conscious delivery, could test whether JPL’s distinctive culture and staff can survive a change in operator—or require NASA to remake parts of its own space enterprise. The contract, currently valued at up to $30 billion and slated to run through Sept. 30, 2028, marks more than routine procurement by examining how much continuity of culture, incentives, and mission focus would endure under new leadership.