Events

Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) Mission

When strong winds on one continent stir up mineral rock dust, those airborne particles can travel thousands of miles and affect entirely different continents. The suspended dust in the air can heat or cool the atmosphere and Earth’s surface. That heating or cooling effect is the focus of NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission, which will measure the surface composition of Earth's deserts and arid regions, helping us understand the impacts dust has on the planet's climate. EMIT’s versatile imaging spectrometer can also help map super-emitters of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – from space, and is already contributing to meaningful climate action.

To Boldly Go Where No Robots Have Gone Before: Solar System Exploration with Autonomous Robots at JPL

The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has the most advanced autonomous driving capability ever flown to Mars. Having such an advanced capability contributes to the rover in its challenging mission to discover signs of life that may have existed on Mars in a distant past. This talk provides an overview on the current research and development efforts on robotics autonomy at JPL, with an emphasis on enhancing the safety, efficiency, and performance of robotic mobility through the applications of risk-aware decision making and machine learning.

Perseverance: Two Years on Mars

The Perseverance Rover has changed the way we look at Mars. We’ll talk with members of the Mars 2020 team about the past two years of operation and discovery.

Student Webinar – Make a Cardboard Rover

Join the JPL Education team online and follow along as we build a cardboard rover powered by rubber bands. In this virtual session for grades 4-12 educators and their students, the JPL Education team will answer your students questions while kicking off this standards-aligned engineering activity live!

How Do Missions Get Formed?

We’ll talk to one of our robotics engineers about project formulation and demonstration, looking at the process of generating ideas - from napkin sketch to prototype to development and testing.

What’s in a Name? How We Find, Name, and Investigate Exoplanets

We live in a golden age of discovery having confirmed over 5,000 Exoplanets. How do we find these worlds and what challenges do we face in the search for more?

Must Watch: Screening of JPL and the Space Age’s ‘The American Rocketeer’

Near Earth Objects – Opportunities for Discoveries

Comets and asteroids offer clues to the chemical mixture from which the planets formed some 4.6 billion years ago. In this talk, we'll discuss with how Near Earth Objects are opportunities for discovery.

Contest: Power to Explore Writing Challenge

It takes a special kind of power to explore the extremes of our solar system, and NASA wants to hear how it would energize your space exploration dreams! If you could plan a mission in our solar system or beyond, where would you go, and what would you explore?

Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor (OWLS)

The Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor (OWLS) is the first life detection suite to explore a wide range of size scales, from single molecules to microscopic organisms, in a water sample. OWLS is an integrated, portable, and autonomous life-detection instrument suite designed to identify and characterize life on ocean worlds. In this talk, we'll discuss why autonomy is important for this and future missions.

JPL and the Space Age: The Footsteps of Voyager

Drawing on rare film footage as well as the memories of the engineers and scientists who were there, “The Footsteps of Voyager” recounts the dramatic experiences of these first-ever encounters at Uranus and Neptune and the efforts to deploy Galileo, a mission that would become the first to orbit an outer planet.

JPL and the Space Age: The Stuff of Dreams

In 1977, the greatest adventure in space exploration began with the launch of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, two robotic explorers designed to explore the deep reaches of our solar system.