NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

“What eventually became NASA's "Jet Propulsion Laboratory"... actually began in the 1920s as an aerodynamics testing facility, under the fledgling "California Institute of Technology" in Pasadena.”

“By the mid-1930s, Parsons and his pals were testing their small "home-made rockets" in an area of Pasadena called "Devil's Canyon"; today, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sits on that very land.”

“He was primarily responsible for the creation of "JPL" (literally, on Halloween 1936, no less) at a rocket test in the Arroyo Seca area of the Devil's Canyon.”

“JPL still refers to this test as the "birthplace" of the Laboratory, and even trots out what they call a "nativity scene" every Halloween to celebrate the event [Fig. 5-21].”

“By the time GALCIT became "JPL," in January 1945, Parsons' professional reputation had been sealed”

“It is also true that no "jet" engine of any kind was ever tested or produced at "JPL"—which was always strictly a rocket laboratory.”

“(which had deep Army ties—via those initial JATO contracts)”

“the services of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as noted, hitherto an Army contractor”

“the German team launched the first successful U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958, in conjunction with JPL”

“After the heady events of that unforgettable 32 hours... the successful liftoff of the Lunar Module "Eagle" and rendezvous with the Command Module "Columbia," still in lunar orbit—CBS moved our unit up the street, to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.”

“went on to be one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and of the Aerojet Corporation.”

“Qian Xuesen, a Chinese engineer who helped establish Parsons’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and China’s ballistic missile program, also believed in an energetic force that imparted information, Qi (Chi).”

“The magick being practiced by Parsons and Hubbard in Southern California in the 1940's, as JPL was born, also saw its roots in ancient Egypt, and ultimately involved the invocation of Osiris, Horus, and the rest of the *same* Egyptian pantheon.”

“The same links can be traced around people like Jack Parsons, who founded JPL, and Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology.”

“The man who would build, point and control the camera was a former JPL employee named Dr. Michael Malin.”

“During the Voyager fly-by of Saturn, Dilettoso was at JPL as a contractor and it was there he met Richard C. Hoagland—who was also at the Lab working as a reporter covering the Voyager mission for American Airlines’ American Way Magazine.”

“Malin was working at JPL at the time, but was planning a move to Arizona soon thereafter to take a position as a professor and scientist in the Geology Department.”

“Malin even moved his entire private company, “Malin Space Science Systems” (which held the actual Mars Observer camera contract) away from ASU in Arizona and JPL in California to San Diego (over 300 miles south of JPL in Pasadena).”

“By 1992, with the September launch of Mars Observer approaching, McDaniel entered the fray. Using various political and academic contacts, he put pressure on NASA and JPL from several directions, forcing them to address, *on the record*, just why they were not able to target Cydonia or the Face specifically.”

“After consulting with Mission Planners at JPL and reviewing the technical specs, they found that there would be more on the order of *forty plus* chances to target the Face during the regular two-year science phase.”

“When Hoagland asked what had happened, Bondurant told him that JPL had somehow “got wind of the series,” and had absolutely “raised hell” back at Headquarters about it.”

“The decision was then abruptly assigned to a “selection committee” run by JPL, who selected Malin and his camera, basically the same 1993 technology that was on Mars Observer, over the more flexible Clementine instrument”

“Contrary to his previous claims about “hitting the lottery,” Malin was able to nail the Face dead center in the image on his first official attempt. Rotating the spacecraft “off-nadir” as it approached Cydonia, Malin and the JPL navigators positioned the probe and its camera to capture the Face nearly perfectly. It was dead center on both the crosstrack and downtrack of the image swath.”

“Within an hour of the release of an image that they surely knew was far below the quality of what could be obtained from the raw data, JPL spin doctors had spread out to the various news media pronouncing the Face to be natural. ... these spin doctors—employees of JPL mostly—insisted that even though they were NASA scientists (and by implication smarter than most of us) they were not speaking for NASA or JPL, but only for themselves.”

“NASA and JPL pronounced that neither would take an official position on the image, thereby draping both organizations in a fallacious robe of objectivity.”

“We decided to first look at the sky over JPL, since that was where the image release was being controlled and where the servers providing the images were almost certain to be located. It didn’t take us long, looking at the stars through Red Shift 2, to pin-point the timing for the image release.”

“At 6:55 p.m. (PDT) on the anointed date, Sirius would be passing through 33º, right over JPL. This moment in turn would open up a “window” in which the three belt stars of Orion would all pass through that 33º altitude over the next ten minutes.”

“But we also realized that a public prediction could alter the conditions of the test, by providing a heads up to JPL that we were tracking them. We decided against a published prediction, since that would make it far too easy to delay the image release by a few minutes and scuttle our test.”

“Instead, we decided to e-mail our prediction to specific researchers and members of the press, including Tom Van Flandern and Art Bell. We predicted an image release at 6:55 p.m. PDT, when Sirius was at 33º above the JPL horizon.”

“As we were watching the JPL websites, with Bara on the main JPL site and Hoagland watching the primary mirror site, we continued to refresh our browsers to insure we got the image at precisely the moment it was posted. Then at 6:55 p.m., exactly as we had predicted, the new image link appeared on the JPL main web page.”

“Then, exactly ten minutes after the image had appeared on the JPL main page, a link to the new image appeared at 7:05 p.m. PDT on the JPL mirror site. So they had released the image twice, in effect, once at the opening of the “alignment window” and once at the close.”

“As a side note, some months later, when reorganizing the Cydonia images under a single web page, NASA/JPL changed the release date and time stamp to show that the second Cydonia image was posted at 6:30 p.m., PDT, taking the release outside the alignment window.”

“The authors can categorically state that this was not the case. The images were released in just the manner described above, at 6:55 and 7:05 p.m.”

“On September 23, 1999 at 9:06 a.m. UTC, JPL lost contact with the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) as it passed behind Mars on its final orbit insertion burn.”

“As with the Mars Observer in 1993, these efforts failed when it was discovered that a navigation error had likely plunged the spacecraft into a terminal crash dive into the Martian atmosphere.”

“The Lockheed/Martin team transmitted acceleration data in the English system, and controllers at JPL assumed that it was metric.”

“Alnilam, the center belt star of Orion/Osiris, the Egyptian god of death, resurrection and the afterlife was positioned at the ubiquitous 19.5° tetrahedral altitude as the engine was fired.”

“Five minutes later, as MCO slipped from view behind the occultation of Mars itself, Mintaka had assumed the 19.5° ritual position.”

“As with Mars Climate Orbiter, there was a significant alignment over JPL that fit the ritual system. This time, we saw Regulus, the heart of the lion in Leo, dead on the horizon when the command was sent to MCO to begin the de-orbit burn.”

“NASA director Dan Goldin appointed a commission headed by Thomas Young, formerly of Lockheed Martin, to investigate not only the MPL disappearance but also the entire Mars program at JPL.”

“Then, just a few days before Young issued his report, former NASA chief debunker James Oberg published a story on UPI that accused JPL employees of knowing full well that the MPL was doomed (due to software problems related to the spacecraft’s landing legs) from very early on in the mission.”

“JPL employees rabidly denied the report, using words like “bunk,” “complete nonsense” and “wacko” to describe their reactions to Oberg’s charge.”

“The Report underscored that the underlying reason for these shortfalls was Goldin's own decision to mandate the, "faster, better, cheaper" space management philosophy.”

“He not only appointed a new “Mars Czar” at NASA Headquarters to oversee all future Mars exploration programs (thus taking such management away from JPL)”

“Yet following NASA’s damaging previous two weeks, stretching from Oberg’s initial bizarre UPI accusation to the release of the Young Report, Dan Goldin flew on March 29, 2000 to JPL itself.”

“I’d also like to acknowledge Admiral Inman, head of the JPL Oversight Committee at Caltech. He couldn’t be here today, but I talked to him by phone. His commitment to the team here is also unwavering. And I thank him for that...”

“In the summer of 1976 (when Viking landed on that oh-so-familiar “ritual date” of July 20), Ron was a newly-graduated high school student, assisting his father at JPL during that incomparable Viking Summer.”

“At about 2:00 p.m. PDT, the first color image from the surface of another planet, Mars, began to emerge on the JPL color video monitors located in many of the surrounding buildings, specifically set up for JPL employees and media personnel to view the Viking images.”

“Two hours after the first color image appeared on the monitors, a technician abruptly changed the image from the light-blue sky and Arizona-like landscape to a uniform orange-red sky and landscape.”

“Ron Levin looked in disbelief as the technician went from monitor to monitor making the change. Minutes later, Ron followed him, resetting the colors to their original appearance... It was Ron Levin being chewed out by the Viking project director himself, James S. Martin, Jr. ... He warned Ron that if he tried something like that again, *he’d be thrown out of JPL for good.*”

“Months later, Gil Levin sought out the JPL Viking imaging team technician who actually made the changes and asked why it was done. The technician responded that he had instructions from the Viking imaging team that the Mars sky and landscape should be red and went around to all the monitors, “tweaking” them to make it so.”

“If atmospheric dust were scattering red light and not blue, the sky would appear red, but since the red would be at least partially removed by the time the light hit the surface, its [the direct sunlight’s] reflection from the surface would make the surface appear more* blue *than red. There would be less red light [in the direct sunlight illumination] left to reflect.”

“Unusual (and still unresolved) discrepancies were found repeatedly, between the original (paradoxically, much clearer) initial television transmissions from CNN's live Pathfinder coverage that July 4 afternoon, and the later electronic versions of those same images released across the web by JPL”

“JPL's web versions were full of astonishingly amateurish compression artifacts, assembly errors and blatant color registration problems”

“JPL even adjusted the color of the Martian sky to appear the traditional "Viking pink" instead of the forecast (from concurrent Hubble imagery)—natural Earth-like blue”

“JPL was clearly trying to hide (and not too well, for some reason …) "something" in these images.”

“Unlike the Mars Global Surveyor, Michael Malin or JPL would not control the THEMIS visible light camera directly”

“SPSR’s semi-official position was that yes, the Catbox image *was* deliberately degraded, but it was only done by JPL to “protect their funding.””

“This dubious (if not ridiculous) position is based on the idea that admitting the truth about Cydonia would inevitably result in a manned mission to Mars, and in such a venture JPL would be out of the funding loop.”