NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena was evacuated on January 8 and remained closed until Monday due to the Eaton Fire. The research center has not yet been damaged by the blaze. Although the emergency disrupted some data processing at JPL and, according to social media reports, severely impacted the JPL community, the Deep Space Network managed to maintain communication with all active spacecraft during the evacuation.
JPL was “spared from the fire thanks to the brave dedication of our first responders. But our community has been severely impacted, with more than 150 JPL employees losing their homes and many more people being displaced,” Lori Leshin, JPL’s director, wrote in an X-faced post on Friday. A JPL Facebook administrator confirmed this grim situation in a comment on Sunday. Most employees have been asked to work from home this week, and administrators have set up a relief fund for the Caltech and JPL communities.
JPL is a federally funded robotic space research laboratory operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on behalf of NASA. It is also home to the Deep Space Network (DSN), a network of giant radio antennas used to communicate with space missions. Established in the late 1950s and early 1960s, NASA’s DSN currently maintains communications with the Voyager probes, the Mars rovers, and the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter. The Space Flight Control Center at JPL “has been operational and staffed daily since 1964,” according to NASA.
According to an evacuation notice posted on the laboratory’s website on Wednesday, “JPL facilities, laboratories, and equipment are being secured and protected. Deep Space Network operations normally conducted at JPL have been moved off-site to a backup operations center.” The good news is that the DSN team kept in touch with its spacecraft throughout the evacuation, Space.com reports.
“Our incredible DSN team did everything they could to ensure that not a single piece of data was lost,” said Nicola Fox, NASA deputy administrator, during the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society taking place this week in Maryland, according to Space.com. “It was a very emotional event, for the first time in 60 years, no one was in the mission control office at JPL because they had to move to the emergency center.”
Unfortunately, the evacuation of the research center resulted in some disruptions in data processing, including some near real-time (NRT) data (information available shortly after it was recorded by the spacecraft), data from the Soil Moisture Active-Passive Measurement Platform (SMAP), which regularly measures surface soil conditions, and data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), which measures atmospheric characteristics twice a day.
While the fact that JPL remained unscathed is a relief to the scientific community, it remains to be seen how the lab will cope with the intensifying dry spells, which are forecast to continue through Wednesday.
