He noted in a 2006 talk that if NASA had relied on the AU value commonly accepted before JPL’s experiment, the Mariner 2 probe—which in 1962 became Earth’s first successful interplanetary ...

JPL, interestingly, is not a direct part or ... but no spacecraft has ever made the journey there faster than August 1962's Mariner 2 mission, which took 109 days to arrive. For another, of ...

The project's first science steering group meeting was held at JPL in December 1972, when Voyager was still called Mariner Jupiter ... and Saturn and Voyager 2 to go on to Uranus and Neptune.

Dr. William Hayward Pickering, a central figure in the U.S. space race and former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1954 to 1976, has died. Pickering - known affectionately as ...