NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The lethal wildfires burning throughout Los Angeles have precipitated widespread devastation throughout Southern California, and their impression has managed to achieve past Earth.
The fires have been relentlessly ravaging properties and infrastructure for the final a number of days and, at one level, additionally they threatened NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. This pressured the house company to evacuate the long-lasting laboratory — leaving the Caltech-managed mission management middle for the Deep House Community, aka NASA’s communications hub for missions to Mars, Jupiter and different photo voltaic system locations, empty for the primary time because it opened its doorways in 1963, NASA officers mentioned Monday (Jan. 13).
“Our hearts and minds exit to our colleagues at JPL, at Caltech, at UCLA and numerous different institutes on the market which are actually struggling,” Nicola Fox, NASA’s affiliate administrate for science missions, mentioned in a NASA city corridor occasion on the 245th American Astronomical Society assembly. “I do know that many people have associates who’ve misplaced homes; who’ve misplaced their properties.”
But, amid that turmoil, the groups that run Deep House Community, or DSN, managed to maintain communication strains open to NASA’s spacecraft, rovers and probes as they continued to discover their designated corners of the photo voltaic system.
“Our unbelievable DSN group has gone above and past to make sure that not a bit of information has been misplaced,” Fox mentioned. “It was a really emotional factor, the primary time within the 60 years that no person was truly within the mission management workplace there at JPL, as a result of they needed to relocate to the emergency middle.”
NASA’s Deep House Community, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2023, makes use of three massive radio antennas in several places all over the world to take care of a gradual stream of information, telemetry and communications with the company’s house missions. These antennas are based mostly in Goldstone, California; Canberra, Australia; and Madrid, Spain — in the event you’ve ever watched NASA scientists wait with bated breath for the primary sign from a Mars rover after touchdown, that sign reached Earth by way of the Deep House Community.
NASA evacuated JPL final week as wildfires threatened the ability, however the house middle seems to have weathered the disaster in fine condition. The fires have killed no less than 16 folks and left hundreds others with out properties, based on media stories.
“NASA JPL is untouched by hearth as a result of courageous dedication of our first responders,” JPL director Laurie Leshin mentioned in a post on the social media site X on Jan. 10. “However our group has been very critically impacted with over 150 JPLers who’ve misplaced their properties and lots of extra displaced.”
Right here in Maryland, Fox praised the American Astronomical Society for refunding registration charges to would-be attendees affected by the fires in Los Angeles. NASA, she added, has additionally relaxed its deadlines for scientists at present writing proposals for company funding, too.
“We’re, as a management group, engaged on one thing to essentially assist assist our colleagues who’re struggling in California,” Fox mentioned. “I’ve bought the management group engaged on one of the simplest ways that we are able to take away no less than the angst of looming funding deadlines.”
Fox additionally hailed these round Southern California who’ve supplied extra private assist to these displaced by the Los Angeles fires.
“I wish to form of actually thank … the individuals who have opened their properties, to supply a short lived energy and a bathe sort of factor,” Fox mentioned with emotion. “I do know it is a good factor that individuals have been providing, and simply it is superb to see this unbelievable group.”
