On October 31, 1936, a group of Caltech graduate students and enthusiasts conducted rocket-propulsion tests in Pasadena's Arroyo Seco, unaware that their work would lead to the creation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ninety years later, JPL is not only celebrating a long line of historic firsts but also paving the way for many more.
Initially a contractor for the U.S. Army, JPL launched America's first satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958. Unlike the Soviet Union's Sputnik, Explorer 1 became the first spacecraft to conduct science, using an onboard Geiger counter to discover the radiation belts surrounding Earth. JPL joined NASA that same year. Within six years, in 1964, the lab sent the first U.S. mission to the Moon, Ranger 7. It also led the first planetary flyby, the first probe to visit all four gas giants, the first infrared telescope, the first rovers on Mars, and the first rotorcraft to fly there.
“Over the course of 90 years, JPL’s first-of-a-kind missions have transformed our understanding of the universe and our place in it,” said Dave Gallagher, JPL’s director since 2025. Gallagher began his career at the lab as an engineer and later led the team that built and tested the Wide-Field and Planetary 2 Camera for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which delivered many of the mission’s most iconic images.
Looking ahead, JPL has several ambitious missions in development. The SkyFall mission, aiming for a 2028 launch, will deploy three helicopters mid-descent over Mars to map hidden ice deposits and analyze weather patterns. MoonFall, set for the same year, will land a group of large propulsive drones at the lunar South Pole to support NASA’s Moon Base plans. The SunRISE mission, launching in 2027, features six small satellites that will fly in formation to create a miles-wide radio antenna dish to study the Sun’s activity, findings that could make space exploration safer for humans.
The asteroid-hunting NEO Surveyor mission, also managed by JPL, will search for potentially hazardous space rocks that other telescopes cannot find. Closer to home, JPL is working on several Earth-observation missions, including one that tracks water movement by measuring gravity changes, another studying tropical storm formation, and a third detailing how different types of air pollution affect human health. The lab also contributes to NISAR, a joint mission with the Indian Space Research Organisation that can monitor Earth’s surface changes related to natural disasters, and the AVIRIS sensors, which can detect rare Earth elements and are flown on airplanes.
JPL developed the “camera on a chip” technology that enables cellphone cameras, and its Microdevices Laboratory is developing detectors for PRIMA, a newly announced NASA mission to study far-infrared radiation.
Caltech President Ray Jayawardhana, also a professor of astronomy, said, “Bringing together the very best of scientific brilliance and engineering ingenuity from across Caltech and JPL continues to advance NASA’s priorities and empower America’s space leadership. I can only imagine what those Caltech students experimenting with rockets in a little patch of dry riverbed would think if they could see what Caltech and JPL have accomplished since, and where we’re headed next. Ninety years later, the same spirit of daring is still opening new frontiers and inspiring humanity.”
The 90th anniversary comes just weeks before another milestone: on November 18, Voyager 1 will reach a full light-day, the distance light travels in 24 hours, about 16 billion miles, from Earth. Ed Stone, who led the Voyager mission for 50 years and served as JPL director for 10, died in 2024, but the Voyagers continue journeying deeper into interstellar space. As Stone once said, “every day is a day of discovery.”