By Joel L. Schiff

Recently I had the good fortune to visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. A good friend, Asif Ahmed, happens to be a rocket scientist who works there and he kindly showed my son and I around the facility. JPL was headed by the celebrated New Zealander, Sir William Pickering, from 1954 to 1976, during the period when the USA launched its first artificial satellite in 1958, Explorer 1, that was designed and built by JPL. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has always been affiliated with the California Institute of Technology, and under Pickering also became a part of NASA. Below are some photos taken during our visit.

The Explorer 1 (at top), America's first artificial satellite. At the base is the famous photograph of William Pickering, James Van Allen, and Wernher von Braun holding up a replica just after the successful insertion into orbit.

The Galileo spacecraft launched by the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989 in order to study Jupiter and its moons. Arriving in 1995, it experienced some antenna problems, but still managed to send back a wealth of data until 2003 when it was deliberately crashed into Jupiter itself.

This is what a rock looks like if you picked one up on the surface of the Moon as this sample hitched a ride back to Earth on one of the lunar missions. Meteoritical lunar samples that come through the Earth's atmosphere the hard way on their own have a typical burnt 'fusion crust' on the outside.

Mission control at lunch time. Hardly anyone is minding the shop! The consoles in the foreground are for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (left) and Voyager. The MRO was launched in 2005 and is an ongoing mission to take hi-res images (note the telescopic mirror) in search of subsurface and ancient water flow on Mars.

Voyager 1 was launched in 1973 and has now left our Solar System but is still chirping back faint signals due to its plutonium based transmitter. A gold-plated audio-visual disc is attached for alien entertainment in the future. An identical Voyager 2 was launched in 1977.

This is the super clean assembly room inhabited by strange creatures in white suits with only slits for their eyes who seemingly walk about randomly. In the top right is a new martian rover under construction, the Mars Scientific Laboratory (MSL) due to be launched to the red planet this November. To the right of the MSL is the top enclosure and at the bottom right is the heat shield.

My friend Asif at JPL, came up with the idea of putting a number of telescope aperture segments into a synchronized orbit and combining the light much as the Keck Telescope does in a single assembly on the ground. But doing this in space is much more difficult and here we see two test vehicles built to establish the concept in principle. The concept is not only brilliant, but believe it or not, it has been shown to work!