It had been polished to just slightly the wrong shape. WFPC also helped pinpoint a manufacturing flaw in the telescope's primary mirror. Intended to be the observatory's primary imaging instrument, WFPC operated flawlessly when the telescope was finally launched in 1990. This work was intended for the Galileo camera system, but also resulted in the Laboratory being awarded the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera in 1978. One of JPL's technology development efforts in the mid-1970s had been research on improving charge-coupled detectors (CCDs) for use in space. This led the Lab into astronomy and Earth science. The downturn in planetary exploration funding during the 1970s had one welcome consequence: JPL began to seek other kinds of spaceflight tasks. Among other things, Galileo found a water ocean under Europa's planetary ice sheet, and possibly under two other moons as well determined that the moon Ganymede has a magnetic field and spotted the first asteroid moon, Dactyl, orbiting main belt asteroid 243 Ida in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Galileo orbiter lasted until September 2003, when JPL ordered it to plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere to ensure that it would not crash into, and contaminate, any of Jupiter's moons. 7, 1995, measuring the composition of Jupiter's atmosphere until it was crushed, as expected, by extreme pressure. The probe entered the Jovian atmosphere on Dec. The atmospheric entry probe carried by Galileo was developed by NASA Ames Research Center. The Galileo mission to Jupiter had been authorized in October 1977 for a 1982 space shuttle launch, but delays to the shuttle program, confusion over the development of an appropriate upper stage to send the probe on its way out of Earth orbit, and finally the loss of space shuttle Challenger and its crew in 1986, postponed Galileo's launch until 1989. Throughout its near-death experience, JPL had a single planetary mission in development. The first of these was the Magellan radar mission to Venus, authorized in 1983. Instead of cancellation, new planetary missions began to be funded. Supporters in the scientific community, members of Congress, and some of Caltech's trustees rallied in protest. Indicating just how low the status of planetary exploration's status had fallen within NASA, in September 1981 the agency's administrator threatened to end planetary exploration entirely and close JPL. Army: a battlefield management tool known as the All-Source Analysis System. The Lab's most significant development during the 1980s was for the U.S. These programs were cut in the early 1980s, and JPL turned to Defense Department work instead. ![]() Corporal first launched in May 1947, about two years after the end of World War II in Europe. The result was JPL's answer to the German V-2 missile. ![]() By 1945, with a staff approaching 300, the group had begun to launch test vehicles from White Sands, New Mexico, to an altitude of 40 miles (60 kilometers), monitoring their performance by radio and war surplus radar equipment.Ĭontrol of the missile was the next step, requiring two-way radio as well as radar and a primitive computer (using radio tubes) at the ground station. In late 1944, the team began tests near Leach Spring in the Mojave desert of small unguided missiles, named Private, that reached a range of about 11 miles (nearly 18 kilometers). Army’s Ordnance Corps beginning in 1944, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's early efforts would eventually involve technologies beyond those of aerodynamics and propellant chemistry - technologies that would evolve into tools for space flight, secure communications, spacecraft navigation and control, and planetary exploration. In their 1943 proposal, the Caltech team referred to their organization for the first time as "the Jet Propulsion Laboratory."įunded by the U.S. research project to understand, duplicate and improve upon the missiles beginning to bombard England. In 1943, the Army asked von Kármán for a technical analysis of the German V-2 program discovered by Allied intelligence.
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