JPL is opening its doors. When? T-minus three months and counting

It’s not every day the Jet Propulsion Laboratory opens its doors to the public for an open house.

But this October, get ready to blast-off into learning about the famous NASA campus, which is celebrating its 90th year.

• Also see: Caltech on edge as its 70-year lock on NASA’s JPL goes up for bid

NASA’s leading hub for the science and engineering of robotic space exploration is opening its doors from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Oct. 10 and 11, JPL announced in June, adding that tickets become available in August.

Visitors will get the chance to visit JPL’s most iconic facilities and explore four thematic areas: “Missions That Changed the World,” “Moon to Mars,” “In Flight,” and “Makerspace.”

JPL is managed by nearby Caltech. Nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, the hub’s roots go back to the development of rocket propulsion all the way back in 1936.

Since then, JPL’s milestones have been plentiful.

By 1958, the lab had built and helped launch America’s first satellite, Explorer 1. Congress that same year would establish NASA, and JPL became a part of the agency. And then came more milestones:

JPL has managed such historic missions as Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, the Mars Exploration Rover program, the Perseverance Mars rover, Europa Clipper, and many more.

The list keeps going, and the open house will explore:

You’d be able to:

-Visit JPL’s Space Flight Operations Facility, a National Historic Landmark. That’s where engineers send commands and receive data from spacecraft billions of miles away;- Discover the Spacecraft Assembly Facility and JPL Machine Shop, where precision spacecraft components are crafted;-See the latest cutting-edge innovations in robotics research, from autonomous lunar rovers to search-and-rescue robots.;-See full-scale models of the Perseverance Mars rover, Voyager, and Galileo; ad-Step inside the Microdevices Laboratory to see how miniature technologies developed there are shaping the future of space exploration and Earth science.

Tickets are free but limited, and they don’t become available until Aug. 29 on a first-come-first-serve basis – a max of five tickets per requester. They aren’t transferable and can’t be sold.

For more information, check out jpl.nasa.gov/news/explore-jpl-to-take-place-oct-10-11/.