collaboration
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The origin of a collaboration between The Huntington and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) stretches back almost a century. In the early 1900s, a handful of visionaries imagined Southern California as a global hub of learning across the humanities, arts, and sciences. One was Henry E. Huntington, who was developing his exceptional library. Another was solar astronomer George Ellery Hale, who played a central role in creating the California Institute of Technology. Caltech’s pioneering work in rocket science would eventually lead to the creation of JPL. Hale convinced Huntington to envision his library as a nexus of research in history, literature, and art. The Huntington Library today holds one of the largest history of science collections in North America. Highlights include Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, which featured the first engravings of the moon peered through the newfangled telescope, and a 1923 logbook from astronomer Edwin Hubble on his observations from a telescope atop Mt. Wilson. These objects and others are on view in the permanent exhibition “Beautiful Science: Ideas That Changed the World” in The Huntington’s Dibner Hall of the History of Science. The Orbit Pavilion at The Huntington celebrates the relationship between these two research-based institutions, the dynamic fulfillment of a vision first proposed almost 100 years ago.
JPL is a federally funded research center in Pasadena that carries out robotic space and earth-science missions and implements programs in planetary exploration, earth science, space-based astronomy, and technology development. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech.
