Milestones

Laurie Leshin, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), has been appointed director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and vice president of Caltech. Leshin will formally assume her position on May 16, 2022, succeeding Michael Watkins, who retired in August 2021, and Lt. Gen. Larry D. James USAF (Ret.), who currently serves as JPL interim […]
 
NASA has selected Howard Hu as the Orion Program manager, based at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. In this role, he will be responsible for the design, development, production, and operations of the agency’s Orion, which is poised to make its first uncrewed flight test around the Moon in the coming months. Hu […]
 
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the appointment of new members to the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), which provides leadership counsel and advice on a variety of important and complex agency programs and topics. Retired Gen. Lester Lyles will continue to chair the NAC and its more than 50 members appointed across the council and five […]
 
NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan announced a new directorate within the U.S. National Science Foundation focused on Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships, or TIP, during his session on Reinvigorating Science and Technology for the Future of U.S. Innovation at SXSW 2022. This new directorate — NSF’s first in more than 30 years — builds upon the agency’s […]
 
The Ingenuity team received the club’s preeminent award, the Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, which honors a person or team who has provided leadership in groundbreaking space or aeronautics achievements in the U.S. The helicopter landed last year on the Red Planet attached to the belly of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover and first took […]
 
Right now, some 182 million miles (293 million kilometers) separate the red clay of Alabama from the dusty red planet Mars. But groundbreaking flight hardware developed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will soon close that distance. The new hardware is an integral component of the Mars Sample Return campaign, a historic […]
 
The President’s fiscal year 2023 budget would allow NASA to sustain America’s global innovation leadership and keep NASA at the forefront of exploration and discovery by returning to the Moon with the Artemis program, among other efforts. This budget would enable NASA to address climate change, drive economic growth, and promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and […]
 
NASA’s upcoming SPHEREx mission will be able to scan the entire sky every six months and create a map of the cosmos unlike any before. Scheduled to launch no later than April 2025, it will probe what happened within the first second after the big bang, how galaxies form and evolve, and the prevalence of […]
 
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft atop arrived at Launch Pad 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for a final test before its Artemis I Moon mission. The uncrewed flight test will pave the way for missions to land the first woman and first person of […]