Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known as JPL, is a federally funded research and development center in La Canada Flintridge, California, founded in 1936 by California Institute of Technology researchers and now owned and sponsored by NASA and managed by Caltech. The laboratory builds and operates planetary robotic spacecraft and also conducts Earth orbit and astronomy missions, and it operates the NASA Deep Space Network. Its active projects include the Mars 2020 mission with the Perseverance rover, the Mars Science Laboratory with Curiosity, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter, the SMAP satellite for Earth monitoring, the NuSTAR X-ray telescope and the Psyche asteroid orbiter.