The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2018

Explorer I marked the start of the Space Age for the U.S., and for the world it heralded the study of Earth from space. The JPL built satellite confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belts, the very first space science discovery.

The InSight mission, scheduled to launch in May, 2018, will be the first NASA mission to observe the deep interior of Mars. Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury are as similar as they are different, and the view granted by our human and robotic eyes only scratches the surface.

Mission planning is a core strength of JPL engineering, along with deep space communications and navigation. This month’s talk, by Cassini mission planner Erick Sturm, will provide a look back at the various scenarios and contingency plans the Cassini team made as they steered the spacecraft into unexplored space during its 2017 Grand Finale.

One of the largest uncertainties in projections of future climate change is how do terrestrial ecosystems (communities of land organisms and their environments) contribute to or help counteract the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Juno is a solar-powered spacecraft which has been orbiting Jupiter since July 4, 2016. For a few hours every 53 days, Juno passes within a few thousand kilometers of the giant planet, and collects a wealth of new information about Jupiter.

Beginning July 2018 the venue for the second day of the von Karman Lecture will be moving from PCC’s Vosloh Forum to Caltech’s Ramo Auditorium.

Virtual and augmented reality promise to transport us to places that we can only imagine. When joined with spacecraft and robots, these technologies will extend humanity's presence to real destinations that are equally fantastic.

The Spitzer Space Telescope is one of NASA’s Great Observatories, designed to observe the universe in infrared light. It was launched in 2003 with an expected lifetime of 5 years.

Much has changed about the way we explore space in the 60 years since NASA began operations on Oct. 1, 1958.

Space-based geodetic measurement techniques such as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS), and SAR-based change detection have recently become critical additions to our toolset for understanding and mapping the damage caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, hurricanes and floods.