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JPL was officially born in 1944 and founded by Theodore Von Kármán, Frank J. Malina, Jack Parsons and Tsien Hsue-shen. The organization was operated by the army until Dec 3 rd 1958 when it was transferred to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In the three decades it has led the nation’s planetary exploration program, the JPL has honed several skills and areas of innovation including deep space navigation and communication, digital image processing, imaging systems, intelligent automated systems, instrument technology, microelectronics and more. Many of these disciplines found applications outside the planetary spacecraft field from solar energy to medical imagery. JPL has sent spacecraft to all the planets in our solar system except Pluto. JPL principle funding provided by NASA

The JPL is located in Pasadena, CA.

Dr. Charles Elachi

Dr. Charles Elachi was born in Lebanon and posesses a strong academic background. He studied in France at the University of Grenoble where he received a B.S. in Physics and the Diplome Ingenieur in Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble in 1968. Elachi also received M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical sciences from the California Institute of Technology in 1969 and 1971 respectively. Later in 1978 he received an MBA from USC and in 1983 an M.S. degree in geology from UCLA.

Elachi is the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Vice President of the California Institute of Technology, where he is holds a position as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Planetary Science. During 1982-2000 he taught “The Physics of Remote Sensing” at Caltech.

He is presently the Team Leader of the Cassini Titan Radar experiment and a co-investigator on the Rosetta Comet Nucleus Sounder Experiment.

Elachi is not only a scientist but also a writer. He has completed over 230 publications in the fields of space and planetary exploration, observation of Earth from space, active microwave remote sensing, electromagnetic theory and integrated optics. He holds several patents in those fields. Elachi wrote three textbooks about remote sensing, one of them even being translated into Chinese.

During his 30 year career at JPL, Dr. Elachi’s leadership grew larger as the field of spaceborne imaging radar changed from as small research area to a major field of scientific research and application. Now JPL and NASA have become the world leaders of spaceborne imaging radars and over the last decade developed Seasat, SIR-A, SIR-B, SIR-C, Magellan, SRTM and the Cassini Radar.

Eerie sounds from Saturn

NASA spacecraft Cassini recorded this radio emission from Saturn. While not specifically a discovery related to the Drake equation this kind of "alternate discovery" is made frequently by organizations using their equipment. Another good example is the space-born background microwave radiation discovered by Bell Labs employees in the 1960's .

Play Saturn radio emission

The Kepler Mission –launch 2007 The Kepler Mission will aid astrobiologists in the search for habitable planets. Of the planets detected so far, with the exception of the pulsar planets, all of them are on the order of jovian (Jupiter-like or "gas giant" planets) or larger in mass. The challenge now is to find Earth-class planets, which are 300 times less massive than Jupiter. The Kepler Mission has been proposed to discover and characterize hundreds of Earth-class planets and will determine the frequency of Earth-class and larger planets in and near the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars.

Terrestrial planet finder- proposed launch 2014 The Terrestrial Planet Finder's mission is to search for Earth-like planets that might harbor life. Terrestrial Planet Finder will take "family portraits" of stars and their orbiting planets and determine which planets may have the right chemistry to sustain life.

Astronomy 101

NASA Jet Propulsion Larboratory

Links to Drake Equation websites

Links to organizations home pages

Dr. Charles Elachi