University-Affiliated and Independent Aerospace Research Institutes

A research institute, research centre, or research organization is an establishment founded for doing research, whether basic or applied, most often in the natural sciences though also in other fields. This group holds the university-affiliated and independently operated aerospace and planetary-science research institutes tracked in this atlas's Northern America space agencies subcategory, distinct from NASA's own field centers and from the private companies grouped elsewhere in the same subcategory. Its members are the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, the Lunar and Planetary Institute, the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, each an established research organization affiliated with a university or an independent nonprofit consortium rather than a facility a national space agency owns and directly operates.