Trade.Information

Company Name: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Company Type: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the lead U.S. center for robotic exploration of the solar system

Company Profile

The 1990s brought major changes at JPL. In 1991, Lew Allen retired and Edward C. Stone, the Voyager project scientist, became JPL's director. The following year, Daniel S. Goldin became NASA administrator. Goldin hated the slow, expensive and not necessarily reliable approach of the past two decades, and set out to reform all of NASA. His favorite targets of ridicule were the failed Mars Observer and a Saturn mission, Cassini/Huygens, which had been recently approved and was expected to cost $3.3 billion. His goal was to reduce the cost of planetary missions all the way down to $150 million. He challenged JPL to adapt itself to his new faster, better, cheaper techniques in a 1992 speech. 

The result was the most vibrant and exciting period of planetary exploration since the 1960s, and a great deal of pain as Ed Stone and the rest of the lab's staff tried to find ways to meet Goldin's challenge. The era ended abruptly in 2000, after JPL lost two more spacecraft, both at Mars. 

The Faster, Better, Cheaper Challenge

Goldin, who had been an executive at aerospace giant TRW, thought that by using new management techniques, new technologies and accepting more risk, NASA could dramatically reduce the cost of missions. More could be done without more money. 

Doing more with less was important because a major political focus of the Clinton administration was achieving a balanced budget. NASA's budget shrank 18 percent between 1992 and 1999. Without finding ways to cut costs substantially, JPL faced extinction. The NASA budget would not support enough Cassini-scale missions to keep the lab operating. 

In a speech at JPL on May 28, 1992, Goldin laid all this out for JPL's staff. We need to stretch ourselves, he said. Be bold -- take risks. [A] project that's 20 for 20 isn't successful. It's proof that we're playing it too safe. If the gain is great, risk is warranted. Failure is OK, as long as it's on a project that's pushing the frontiers of technology.

n 1992, NASA inaugurated a new Discovery program aimed at producing a series of inexpensive, competitively selected, science-focused missions. NASA chose JPL to manage three of these missions: Mars Pathfinder, Stardust and Genesis. Of these, Mars Pathfinder was unique. It was assigned by NASA like a traditional project, not selected via a competition, and it was built 'in-house' at JPL, not by a contractor. 

For a total cost of $265 million, project manager Tony Spear and his team were to land a small, short-lived spacecraft on Mars using a new airbag-based landing technique. Pathfinder would also deliver a cigarette-carton-sized 'microrover' to the surface. The mission was launched in December 1996 and landed July 4, 1997. Pathfinder, and especially its rover, Sojourner Truth, were hugely popular during the mission's short life. Its flight team had established one of NASA's first Web sites, and in the mission's first week, it drew more than 136 million hits. This confirmed for NASA leaders the popularity of Mars.

Stardust to a Comet 

Stardust was JPL's second Discovery mission. This and another Discovery mission, Genesis, returned the first samples from space since the Apollo program ended. 

Proposed by Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, Stardust's goal was to collect dust from a comet, Wild 2, and return it to Earth for study. Most scientists believe that comets are remnants of the material the planets are made from, and are the oldest surviving material in the solar system. But returning samples of comet dust was extremely challenging for two reasons. Despite having to be inexpensive, the spacecraft had to survive a seven-year mission. And its return to Earth would be at the highest re-entry velocity NASA had attempted. Launched Feb. 7, 1999, Stardust made its sample collection in 2004. Its sample return capsule parachuted into the Utah desert on Jan. 15, 2006. 

Scientific analysis for this mission is just beginning. 

Genesis and the Solar Wind 

Genesis, JPL's third Discovery project, was also a sample return mission. Proposed by Donald Burnett of Caltech, Genesis collected particles of the solar wind at the L1 point, where the gravitational pulls of Earth and the sun balance exactly. Genesis was launched Aug. 8, 2001, and began collecting particles that December. Its sample return capsule entered the atmosphere Sept. 8, 2004, but its parachute system failed, and the capsule hit the ground at 311 kilometers per hour (193 miles per hour). The damaged capsule's contents were still mostly retrievable, and the mission's scientists turned to finding ways to remove Earthly contamination from the samples.

Recovering from the Mars Observer loss of 1993 was a top priority. A complete set of spares for a re-flight of the mission existed, but the cost of a second Titan III launch rocket was too expensive. Goldin ordered the planetary program to devise all of its future missions around the capabilities of the much less expensive (and much smaller) Delta 2. So Lockheed-Martin Astronautics of Denver proposed re-flying five of Mars Observer's eight experiments using the spare electronics, a new spacecraft bus and the aerobraking technique. This became the Mars Global Surveyor mission. 


Mars Global Surveyor was launched Nov. 7, 1996, with a cost under-run of about $2 million. It started aerobraking in September 1997, and its flight team expected to achieve its science orbit six months later. But during one of the aerobraking passes, one of the solar panels started flexing in the air flow too much, and the team had to slow the process to protect it. The flaw was traced to a part that had cracked shortly after launch. So aerobraking lasted until February 1999. 


Global Surveyor, however, then lasted far beyond its designed life. Still operating in 2006, it produced mineralogical and magnetic field maps of the Mars surface. It also provided thousands of spectacular high-resolution images. Its data suggested Mars had once had plate tectonics as Earth still does, and that the surface is still being altered on occasion by water from subsurface ice.

On Dec. 11, 1998, the Mars Surveyor program launched the first of its two missions for the 1998/1999 launch window. Named the Mars Climate Orbiter, the spacecraft carried two more Mars Observer instruments. During its orbit insertion on Sept. 23, 1999, Climate Orbiter disappeared. Unlike the Mars Observer case, JPL knew within hours what had happened. A computer program in the ground control system had been written to use English Engineering Units (feet, pounds, etc.) instead of NASA-mandated metric (meters, kilograms, etc.). This had caused the spacecraft to be just far enough off course to hit the atmosphere while going into orbit. 

The Climate Orbiter was the first mission JPL had ever lost to a navigation error. Director Ed Stone had John Casani, who had been project manager for Voyager and Galileo, immediately start a detailed review of the second mission, which was already on its way to Mars. This was the Mars Polar Lander, launched Jan. 3, 1999. Stone hoped Casani and the small team he assembled would be able to identify and fix anything that might be wrong with Polar Lander in the short period of time before it reached Mars. 

The Polar Lander's target was the south polar region of Mars. It used a Viking-like lander equipped with a landing rocket and legs. In addition to the lander, it consisted of a cruise stage that would fly past Mars after releasing the lander, and two Deep Space 2 surface penetrator probes. They were also released by the cruise stage and entered the atmosphere independently of the lander. 

The Polar Lander disappeared Dec. 3, 1999, apparently crashing onto its landing site. The spacecraft had not been designed to provide telemetry during its descent so a definitive cause could not be found. But a test on duplicate hardware at Lockheed suggested that the most likely cause was a software fault that had shut off the descent rocket too early, causing the spacecraft to fall the last 60 meters (about 65 yards) or so to the surface. The penetrator probes were also lost without a trace. 

After these losses, NASA overhauled the Mars program, adding more money while reducing the objectives for the 2001 mission to a single orbiter. This marked the end of Faster/Better/Cheaper management for Mars.

Initiated in 1994, the New Millennium Program carried out two low-cost, technology-focused missions in the 1990s, Deep Space 1 and Deep Space 2. 

The Deep Space 1 mission's primary goal was to demonstrate solar electric, or ion, propulsion, related navigation technologies, and new electronic, communications and instrument technologies. Launched Oct. 24, 1998, Deep Space 1 navigated to comet Borelly, where it made a very close pass on Sept. 22, 2001. It captured the highest-resolution imagery of a comet nucleus in existence. 

The Deep Space 2 mission consisted of a pair of penetrator probes carried to Mars on the 1999 Mars Polar Lander. These were lost along with the Polar Lander.

The Cassini mission to Saturn was to be the last of NASA's flagship missions: large, expensive and technologically advanced. Its origins were in a 1982 study of possible joint NASA/European Space Agency missions. This had suggested a Saturn orbiter with an atmospheric entry probe intended for the large moon Titan would be a high priority project. But due to both the fiscal climate of the early 1980s and to difficulties in negotiations, the mission was not approved until 1989. 

Flagship projects at JPL had the benefit of funding development of new spacecraft technologies that smaller, less expensive missions could not afford. Cassini-funded technologies were adopted by Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Pathfinder and the Spitzer Space Telescope among many others. When Cassini came under attack in 1993 and 1994 for its $3.3 billion price tag, defending it meant protecting these other efforts, too. 

Somewhat later in its development, Cassini faced a legal challenge filed by activists opposed to its use of radioisotope thermoelectric generators and mission trajectory involving an Earth swingby. A legal challenge to the mission's Environmental Impact Statement was filed in federal court in Hawaii right before launch in an attempt to stop the mission. It was rejected by both the federal district court in Hawaii and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, clearing the mission's path. 

A Titan IV rocket hurled Cassini-Huygens on its way to Saturn on Oct. 15, 1997. On Jul., 1 2004, after flybys of Venus, Earth and Jupiter, the spacecraft reached Saturn and attained orbit. This mission is still active.

Goldin's interpretation of the 1999 failures was that JPL had found the 'floor' below which costs could not be driven without too much risk. He relented on costs, appointed a new Mars program manager, and JPL began an effort to codify design principles and testing standards for all future missions. Several missions started prior to 2000 continued as 'faster-better-cheaper' projects (Stardust, for example), and were very successful. But projects initiated after 2000 were held to stricter standards, and costs rose accordingly. Faster-better-cheaper was over.

About Company

Do not go where the path may lead, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail. That could be the motto of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Trailblazing has been the business of JPL since it was established by the California Institute of Technology in the 1930s. America's first satellite, Explorer 1, was created at JPL. In the decades that followed, we sent the first robotic craft to the Moon and out across the solar system, reconnoitering all of the planets. Pushing the outer edge of exploration, in fact, is the reason JPL exists as a NASA laboratory. 

In that spirit, this is an exceptionally busy period for JPL in laying new paths. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, our newest spacecraft at the red planet, is returning exceptionally detailed photos of the surface using its high-resolution camera. Like the batteries that don't give up, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers carry on in their forays across Mars, examining rocks for the story they tell of water in the planet's past -- far beyond the mission they were originally designed for. The flagship explorer Cassini continues its orbits of Saturn, scrutinizing the ringed planet and its moons, including the haze-shrouded Titan. The Voyagers are exploring the edge of our solar system. In 2007 we are preparing for the launches of two exciting new missions -- the Dawn spacecraft to orbit the large asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and Mars Phoenix to dig into the water ice near Mars' pole. 

Closer to home, a contingent of Earth-orbiting satellites monitors the lands, oceans and atmosphere of our own planet. When CloudSat was launched last year, it joined a number of JPL satellites and instruments returning important information on topics ranging from atmospheric ozone to El Nino events. And yet another collection of explorers is looking far beyond the solar system to search for Earth-like planets and understand the history of distant galaxies. These include the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, as well as ground-based projects such as JPL instruments on the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. In total, JPL has 17 spacecraft and six instruments arrayed across the solar system. All these missions are part of NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, designed to explore Earth and space and to send robots and humans to explore the Moon, Mars and beyond. 

These ventures would not be possible without NASA's Deep Space Network, also managed by JPL. This international network of antenna complexes on several continents serves as the communication gateway between distant spacecraft and the Earth-based teams that guide them. 

While carrying out these exploration missions, JPL also conducts a number of space technology demonstrations in support of national security and develops technologies for uses on Earth in fields from public safety to medicine, capitalizing on NASA's investment in space technology. 

JPL is a NASA center staffed and managed for the government by a leading private university, Caltech -- and thus we are known as a federally funded research and development center. I believe that this marriage of the government and university worlds lends us a wonderful intellectual infusion to drive our exploration efforts. Caltech anchors us in the world of excellence and academic curiosity, while NASA gives us the opportunity to reach for the stars. 

Venturing into the unknown is not always easy. But as Teddy Roosevelt once said, Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. 

The stories of these mighty things we dare are told in the pages that begin here. I hope you will enjoy your visit, and that you find JPL's website to be an inspiring and valuable resource.