The main asteroid belt contains millions of objects but only a few date from the earliest stages of planet formation. The Dawn mission, managed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explored two such fossils: protoplanet Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, the latter of whi... More »
You might not realize it, but there’s a silent symphony overhead at any given time: NASA’s satellites talking to Earth. They track our planet’s weather, the height of its oceans, and even the changing mass of its ice. Those science measurements are then beamed... More »
JPL launches into its eighth decade as the world’s one-of-a-kind innovation institution that has changed the world and advanced mankind in remarkable ways that many only dreamed of when it was created in the early 20th century. What started as an idea from Cal... More »
Eighty years ago, when interplanetary travel was still a fiction and that fiction looked like Flash Gordon, seven young men drove out to a dry canyon wash in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and helped jump-start the Space Age. They were out there on... More »
JPL has confirmed Earth experienced a near miss on Sunday night as an asteroid passed near the planet, dodging it by a “mere” 300,000 miles, a report said Monday. Astronomers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory spotted the asteroid, referred to as a Near Earth Object... More »
Deep oil drilling on Huntington Beach in the Los Angeles basin could have caused the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, the deadliest earthquake ever to hit southern California on record, a new study by two government scientists in Pasadena suggests. A report in the ... More »
Noted writers Alan Lightman, Jill Bialosky and former Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove held a packed room at the Pasadena Westin silently in their hands on a rare rainy Sunday afternoon, as Red Hen Press, celebrated 22 years as one of the most accl... More »
Driving a rover on Mars from a command room on Earth is not an easy or intuitive task. Scientists and engineers cannot observe the often-treacherous Martian environment in real time, so charting a course for a rover involves a lot of trial-and-error inputting ... More »
Before Alice Michel began her senior year at Caltech, the Wikipedia page for her major, geobiology, was a short and rudimentary entry — “woefully incomplete,” according to Michel’s academic advisor, Professor of Geobiology Alex Sessions. “It was a bit of an em... More »
Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist visited Caltech on October 20 to learn about research being conducted in several labs on campus; to catch up with former Harvard classmate Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum; and to participate in a question-and... More »
The Pasadena Playhouse District buzzed with excitement on Saturday. Art Walk welcomed local artists to sell and share their work on Colorado Boulevard. This diverse art show featured paintings, pottery, photography and jewelry. Mariko Bird showcased fine art h... More »
Planet Nine – the undiscovered planet at the edge of the Solar System that was predicted by the work of Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in January 2016 – appears to be responsible for the unusual tilt of the sun, according to a new study. The large... More »
