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Politics & Government

JPL Retires a Partner with Friday's Final Space Shuttle Launch

Watch the launch live as Jet Propulsion Laboratory's 30-year relationship ends with the final flight of NASA's Space Shuttle program.

NASA’s space shuttle program takes one step closer to its closing chapter with the final shuttle launch of Atlantis, retiring not only a fleet of iconic spacecraft, but also a long, important relationship with Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

Watch the launch here.

has been closely linked to the shuttle program since its first launch in 1981. Alan Buis, with JPL Media Relations, noted that  “a number of prominent JPL missions have used the Space Shuttle as a platform for science and technology,” he wrote in an email to Patch.

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The Shuttle Imaging Radar instruments, designed and built by JPL, flew aboard the Shuttle Columbia in 1981, collecting images of geologic areas on the planet Earth. The instruments were used again in 1984 on Challenger, as part of experiments conducted in oceanography, geology, and also for missions of the Shuttle Endeavor in April 1994 and Discovery in September 1994.

The orbiter Galileo launched from Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989 on its mission to explore Jupiter. That same year, Atlantis also launched Magellan to orbit Venus. 

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In 1990, Space Shuttle Discovery launched sun orbiter Ulysses and the Upper Atmosphere research Satellite, which held JPL’s ACRIM2 instrument used to measure the sun’s energy output.

On board the Shuttle Endeavor in 2000, the Shuttle Radar Topography mission produced  “the world’s most accurate topographic map of the Earth.”

And of course, there’s Hubble.

The space telescope’s wide field and planetary cameras were launched aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990. When those failed to perform as expected, JPL designed and built version two of the cameras, sending them to Hubble care of space walking astronauts from the Space Shuttle Endeavor in 1993. After 135,000 images and almost 20 years in space, Hubble’s second round of cameras returned to earth aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2009.

Several astronauts also got their start at JPL, where they worked as staff and research engineers, research scientists, and program managers before being selected by NASA. Stephanie Wilson, Stanley Love, Taylor Wang, Eugene Trinh, Andrew Thomas, John Olivas all worked at JPL before becoming Space Shuttle astronauts.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is set to return to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 20. It will then be decommissioned and put on display at the center’s visitors complex. JPL will continue to explore space, just without the aid of shuttles.

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