JPL

Many JPL innovations improve health care, public safety, and communications. For example: During the COVID-19 pandemic, JPL engineers developed a low-cost ventilator prototype specifically to treat COVID patients. They developed the device in just 37 days and licensed it free to manufacturers.

When you use your cellphone, think of JPL. The Lab is where an imaging technology based on an Active Pixel Sensor technology (CMOS APS), which uses 1/100th the power of CCDs, led to the birth of consumer-level high-quality digital photography such as what's available for use inside our smartphones.

The Lab is known internationally for its journeys to other worlds, but JPL's missions to study our planet and its natural satellite help researchers understand climate change and where there is water on the Moon.

The SWOT mission brings together two communities focused on developing a better understanding of the world's oceans and its terrestrial surface waters. U.S. and French oceanographers and hydrologists and international partners have joined forces to develop this satellite mission to make the first global survey of Earth's surface water, observe the fine details of the ocean's surface topography, and measure how water bodies change over time.

Professor of Planetary Science Bethany Ehlmann is the principal investigator on Lunar Trailblazer, an upcoming NASA mission to map the Moon's surface from orbit. The information this small satellite will provide after it launches later this year will ultimately help researchers understand the form, abundance, and distribution of water on the Moon, and set the stage for the next generation of lunar exploration.

Past JPL landers including Spirit, Opportunity, and InSight revealed secrets of the Martian surface. A new generation of missions has continued their legacy.

The Perseverance Mars rover is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the Red Planet. A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. Perseverance is investigating Jezero Crater – a region of Mars where the ancient environment may have been favorable for microbial life – probing the Martian rocks for evidence of past life. Learn more about the Perseverance rover.

Curiosity set out to answer the question of whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support microbial life. Early in its mission, Curiosity's scientific tools found chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments on Mars. It continues to explore the rock record from a time when Mars could have been home to microbial life. Learn more about the Curiosity Rover.

Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, was a technology demonstration that successfully tested powered controlled flight on another world for the first time. It hitched a ride to Mars on the Perseverance rover. Once the rover reached a suitable "airfield" location, it released Ingenuity to the surface so it could perform a series of test flights. Ingenuity flew 72 times with an average flight time of more than two hours, reaching a maximum altitude of 24 meters, before it completed its mission on January 25, 2024 . Learn more about the Mars Helicopter.

JPL missions have given humanity its first up-close glimpse of the planets in the outer solar system, investigated intriguing moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and investigated the composition of comets and asteroids.

The Psyche spacecraft, which launched in October of 2023, is making a journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid, also called Psyche, that orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. By August 2029, the spacecraft will begin exploring the asteroid, which, scientists think, may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet. Learn more about the Psyche Orbiter.

The twin Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Their primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018. The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain, and beyond. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN. Learn more about the Voyager missions.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, mission, which launched in 2012, studies the universe in high-energy X-rays to better understand the dynamics of black holes, exploding stars, and the most extreme active galaxies. Led by Fiona Harrison, Caltech's Harold A. Rosen Professor of Physics and the Kent and Joyce Kresa Leadership Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, the mission is opening a new window on the universe. NuSTAR is the first hard-focusing X-ray telescope to orbit Earth and has greatly improved on observations from ground-based observatories.