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In 1989, the Voyager 2 mission discovered six new moons orbiting Neptune, including five tiny ones that orbit just outside the planet’s main rings. Because of their small sizes and locations, these satellites have been difficult to study from Earth. Now, using... More »
Caltech chemistry professor Hosea Nelson (PhD ’13) has his eyes on a big goal: He wants to know the three-dimensional (3D) structure of all the molecules found in the natural world. No one knows exactly how many structures that entails, but certainly, he says,... More »
A spacecraft headed for the Moon is spending the summer in the foothills above Pasadena, getting rattled, blasted with sound, and baked in simulated space — all before it ever leaves the ground. Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lunar lander, which NASA has designated Mo... More »
On a planet where the sun never sets and never fully rises, the concert never ends. That is the premise of the latest poster from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which imagines a rock show on the surface of Proxima Centauri b — the closest known planet outsi... More »
NASA’s Juno mission has produced the first measurements of the temperature below the surface of Io, the most volcanically active world in the solar system, in a study whose lead author works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The measurements rev... More »
Two new multi-institution collaborations led by Caltech scientists have been selected to receive first-round funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Genesis Mission, a national effort to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery. The fi... More »
NASA’s newest class of suborbital Earth science missions is preparing for flight, with the first mission set to study dangerous wildfire-generated storm clouds using aircraft-mounted instruments, including infrared wildfire trackers developed by Jet Propulsion... More »
New research led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has revealed the identity of a puzzling near-Earth object by precisely tracking its motion through space and using powerful observatories that image faint celestial objec... More »
Somewhere between the sunlit surface of the ocean and the dark floor thousands of feet below, a quiet snowfall is always underway. Not ice crystals, but clumps of dead algae, bacterial mucus, and organic debris — marine snow, the ocean’s slow-motion conveyor b... More »
NASA’s Perseverance rover, built and operated by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has found evidence that repeated asteroid strikes helped construct a 245-foot-thick sequence of rocks on the rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater more than 3.9 billion years ago. The... More »
Two phrases now shape every serious conversation about quantum computing — when it will arrive, what it can do, how close the machines are to working. Both were coined by the same person, in the same building, on a campus a few blocks from Colorado Boulevard. ... More »
The last time NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory invited the public inside, every ticket was gone before most people had finished their morning coffee. That was 2023. Three years, four rounds of layoffs, a wildfire evacuation and a 90th birthday later, JPL is do... More »
