Space Science and Instruments at NASA

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which completed eighty years of its existence in 2016, builds instruments for NASA missions. Exploring the universe and our own planet Earth from space has been the mission of NASA. Robotics missions such as Voyager, which continues to go beyond our solar system, missions to Mars and other planets, exploring the stars and galaxies for astrophysics missions, exploring and answering questions such as, “are we alone in this universe?”

Fundamental science questions drives the selection of NASA missions and innovative instrument development. We develop instruments to make measurements that can answer those science questions. In this presentation, we will present an overview of the state of the art instruments that we are currently developing and layout the details of the science questions they will try to answer. Rapid progress in multiple fronts, such as commercial software for component and device modeling, low-loss circuits and interconnect technologies, cell phone technologies, and submicron scale lithographic techniques are making it possible for us to design and develop smart, low-power yet very powerful instruments that can even fit-in a SmallSat or CubeSat. We will also discuss the challenges of the future generation instruments in addressing the needs for critical scientific applications.

The research described herein was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA, under contract with National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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