University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park is a public research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland, is the largest university in both the state and the Washington metropolitan area, with more than 41,000 students representing all fifty states and 123 countries, a global alumni network of over 360,000, its twelve schools and colleges together offer over 200 degree-granting programs, including 92 undergraduate majors, 107 master's programs, 83 doctoral programs. UMD is a member of the Association of American Universities and competes in intercollegiate athletics as a member of the Big Ten Conference; the University of Maryland's proximity to the nation's capital has resulted in many research partnerships with the federal government. It is classified as one of 115 first tier research universities in the country by the Carnegie Foundation, is labeled a "Public Ivy", denoting a quality of education comparable to the private Ivy League.
UMD is ranked among the top 100 universities both nationally and globally by several indices. In 2016, the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore formalized their strategic partnership after their collaboration created more innovative medical and educational programs, as well as greater research grants and joint faculty appointments than either campus has been able to accomplish on its own; as of 2017, the operating budget of the University of Maryland is $2.1 billion. For the 2018 fiscal year, the university received a total of over $545 million in external research funding. In October 2017, the university received a record-breaking donation of $219.5 million from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, ranking among the largest philanthropic gifts to a public university in the country. On March 6, 1856, the forerunner of today's University of Maryland was chartered as the Maryland Agricultural College. Two years Charles Benedict Calvert, a future U.
S. Representative from the sixth congressional district of Maryland, 1861-1863, during the American Civil War and descendent of the first Lord Baltimores, colonial proprietors of the Province of Maryland in 1634, purchased 420 acres of the Riversdale Mansion estate nearby today's College Park, Maryland; that year, Calvert founded the school and was the acting president from 1859 to 1860. On October 5, 1859, the first 34 students entered the Maryland Agricultural College; the school became a land grant college in February 1864. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers under Brigadier General Bradley Tyler Johnson moved past the college on July 12, 1864 as part of Jubal Early's raid on Washington, D. C. By the end of the war, financial problems forced the administrators to sell off 200 acres of land, the continuing decline in enrollment sent the Maryland Agricultural College into bankruptcy. For the next two years the campus was used as a boys preparatory school. Following the Civil War, in February 1866 the Maryland legislature assumed half ownership of the school.
The college thus became in part a state institution. By October 1867, the school reopened with 11 students. In the next six years, enrollment grew and the school's debt was paid off. In 1873, Samuel Jones, a former Confederate Major General, became president of the college. Twenty years the federally funded Agricultural Experiment Station was established there. During the same period, state laws granted the college regulatory powers in several areas—including controlling farm disease, inspecting feed, establishing a state weather bureau and geological survey, housing the board of forestry. Morrill Hall was built the following year. On November 29, 1912, a fire destroyed the barracks where the students were housed, all the school's records, most of the academic buildings, leaving only Morrill Hall untouched. There were no injuries or fatalities, all but two students returned to the university and insisted on classes continuing. Students were housed by families in neighboring towns until housing could be rebuilt, although a new administration building was not built until the 1940s.
A large brick and concrete compass inlaid in the ground designates the former center of campus as it existed in 1912. The state took control of the school in 1916, the institution was renamed Maryland State College; that year, the first female students enrolled at the school. On April 9, 1920, the college became part of the existing University of Maryland, replacing St. John's College, Annapolis as the University's undergraduate campus. In the same year, the graduate school on the College Park campus awarded its first PhD degrees and the university's enrollment reached 500 students. In 1925 the university was accredited by the Association of American Universities. By the time the first black students enrolled at the university in 1951, enrollment had grown to nearly 10,000 students—4,000 of whom were women. Prior to 1951, many black students in Maryland were enrolled at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. In 1957, President Wilson H. Elkins made a push to increase academic standards at the university.
His efforts resulted in the creation of one of the first Academic Probation Plans. The first year the plan went into effect, 1,550 students (18% of the total student body
Astrogeology Research Program
The Astrogeology Science Center is the entity within the United States Geological Survey concerned with the study of planetary geology and planetary cartography. It is housed in the Shoemaker Building in Arizona; the Center was established in 1963 by Eugene Merle Shoemaker to provide lunar geologic mapping and to assist in training astronauts destined for the Moon as part of the Apollo program. Since its inception, the Astrogeology Science Center has participated in processing and analyzing data from various missions to the planetary bodies in the Solar System, assisting in finding potential landing sites for exploration vehicles, mapping our neighboring planets and their moons, conducting research to better understand the origins and geologic processes operating on these bodies. Gene Shoemaker founded the Astrogeology Research Program August 25, 1960; the research program started out as the Astrogeologic Studies Group at the United States Geological Survey center in Menlo Park, California.
The research program was moved to Arizona. Flagstaff was chosen as the location due to its proximity to Meteor Crater and the volcanic craters and lava flows of the San Francisco volcanic field. Dr. Shoemaker retired from the USGS in 1993, he remained on Emeritus status with the USGS and maintained an affiliation with Lowell Observatory until his death in a car accident in Australia in 1997. Gene was involved in the Lunar Ranger and Surveyor programs and continued with the manned Apollo programs, he culminated his lunar studies in 1994 with new data on the Moon from Project Clementine, for which he was the science-team leader. Gene collaborated with his wife, Carolyn, a planetary astronomer; the discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with colleague David Levy, gained them worldwide fame. This was just one of Gene's many great accomplishments. Starting in 1963, the Astrogeology Science Center played an important role in training astronauts destined to explore the lunar surface and in supporting the testing of equipment for both manned and unmanned missions.
As part of the astronauts' training, USGS and NASA geoscientists gave lectures and field trips during the 1960s and early 1970s to teach astronauts the basics of terrestrial and lunar geology. Field trips included excursions into the Grand Canyon to demonstrate the development of geologic structure over time; this training was essential to giving astronauts the skills and understanding to make observations about what they would see on the lunar surface and to collect samples for study back on Earth. The volcanic fields around Flagstaff have proven useful in testing equipment and training astronauts. Cameras planned for use in the Surveyor project were tested on the Bonito Flow in Sunset Crater National Park because the lava flow appeared to be similar to flows on the lunar surface. A field of artificial impact craters were created in the Cinder Lakes volcanic field near Flagstaff to create a surface similar to the proposed first manned American landing site on the Moon. Jack Schmitt joined the Astrogeology team as a geologist at the Flagstaff Science Center in 1964, having earned a doctorate degree from Harvard University.
In addition to assisting in the geologic mapping of the Moon, he led the Lunar Field Geological Methods project. When NASA announced a special recruitment for scientist-astronauts in late 1964, Schmitt applied. Out of more than 1,000 applicants, six were chosen. Of those six, Joe Kerwin, Owen Garriott, Edward Gibson would fly in the Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974, Schmitt would go to the Moon on the Apollo 17 mission. Today, the mission of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center is to serve the Nation, the international planetary science community, the general public's pursuit of new knowledge of our Solar System by: Conducting innovative, fundamental research that advances the fields of planetary cartography and remote sensing. Developing state-of-the-art software and techniques for the scientific and cartographic analysis of planetary remote sensing data. Participating in the collaborative planning and operation of space exploration missions. Producing accurate cartographic products, recognized internationally as benchmarks.
Establishing data archive and mapping standards that foster international consistency. Archiving and distributing data and products for efficient access through modern technology; the USGS Astrogeology Science Center participates in all phases of spaceflight missions across the Solar System. This includes providing scientific input for mission planning, creating foundational geospatial data products, supplying landing site maps and characterization, tactical operations of rovers and orbiters, assuring the long-term accessibility of the data returned from these missions. Historic, recent and upcoming space missions involving the USGS Astrogeology Research Program include: Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers - a specialized software package developed by the USGS to process images and spectra collected by current and past NASA planetary missions. Robotic Lunar Observatory USGS Astrogeology Science Center USGS Flagstaff Science Center
Goddard Space Flight Center
The Goddard Space Flight Center is a major NASA space research laboratory located 6.5 miles northeast of Washington, D. C. in unincorporated Prince George's County, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC employs 10,000 civil servants and contractors, it is one of ten major NASA field centers, named in recognition of American rocket propulsion pioneer Dr. Robert H. Goddard. GSFC is within the former Goddard census-designated place. GSFC is the largest combined organization of scientists and engineers in the United States dedicated to increasing knowledge of the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe via observations from space. GSFC is a major US laboratory for operating unmanned scientific spacecraft. GSFC conducts scientific investigation and operation of space systems, development of related technologies. Goddard scientists can develop and support a mission, Goddard engineers and technicians can design and build the spacecraft for that mission. Goddard scientist John C.
Mather shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on COBE. GSFC operates two spaceflight tracking and data acquisition networks and maintains advanced space and Earth science data information systems, develops satellite systems for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. GSFC manages operations for many NASA and international missions including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Explorers Program, the Discovery Program, the Earth Observing System, INTEGRAL, MAVEN, OSIRIS-REx, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Swift. Past missions managed by GSFC include the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, SMM, COBE, IUE, ROSAT. Unmanned earth observation missions and observatories in Earth orbit are managed by GSFC, while unmanned planetary missions are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Goddard is NASA's first, oldest, space center, its original charter was to perform five major functions on behalf of NASA: technology development and fabrication, scientific research, technical operations, project management.
The center is organized into several directorates, each charged with one of these key functions. Until May 1, 1959, NASA's presence in Greenbelt, Maryland was known as the Beltsville Space Center, it was renamed the Goddard Space Flight Center, after Dr. Robert H. Goddard, its first 157 employees transferred from the United States Navy's Project Vanguard missile program, but continued their work at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D. C. while the center was under construction. Goddard Space Flight Center contributed to Project Mercury, America's first manned space flight program; the Center assumed a lead role for the project in its early days and managed the first 250 employees involved in the effort, who were stationed at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. However, the size and scope of Project Mercury soon prompted NASA to build a new Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas. Project Mercury's personnel and activities were transferred there in 1961.
Goddard Space Flight Center remained involved in the manned space flight program, providing computer support and radar tracking of flights through a worldwide network of ground stations called the Spacecraft Tracking and Data Acquisition Network. However, the Center focused on designing unmanned satellites and spacecraft for scientific research missions. Goddard pioneered several fields of spacecraft development, including modular spacecraft design, which reduced costs and made it possible to repair satellites in orbit. Goddard's Solar Max satellite, launched in 1980, was repaired by astronauts on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984; the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, remains in service and continues to grow in capability thanks to its modular design and multiple servicing missions by the Space Shuttle. Today, the center remains involved in each of NASA's key programs. Goddard has developed more instruments for planetary exploration than any other organization, among them scientific instruments sent to every planet in the Solar System.
The Center's contribution to the Earth Science Enterprise includes several spacecraft in the Earth Observing System fleet as well as EOSDIS, a science data collection and distribution system. For the manned space flight program, Goddard develops tools for use by astronauts during extra-vehicular activity, operates the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft designed to study the Moon in preparation for future manned exploration. Goddard's wooded campus is a few miles northeast of Washington, D. C. in Prince George's County. The center is on Greenbelt Road, Maryland Route 193. Baltimore, NASA Headquarters in Washington are 30–45 minutes away by highway. Greenbelt has a train station with access to the Washington Metro system and the MARC commuter train's Camden line; the High Bay Cleanroom located in building 29 is the world's largest ISO 7 cleanroom with 1.3 million cubic feet of space. Vacuum chambers in adjacent buildings 10 and 7 can be chilled or heated to +/- 200 °C. Adjacent building 15 houses the High Capacity Centrifuge, capable of generating 30 G on up to a 2.5 tons load.
Parsons Corporation assisted in the construction of the Class 10,000 cleanroom to support Hubble Space Telescope as well as other Goddard missions. The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center is NASA's designated center for the archiving and
Astrophysics Data System
The Astrophysics Data System is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers from both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources. Abstracts are available free online for all articles, full scanned articles are available in Graphics Interchange Format and Portable Document Format for older articles, it was developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is managed by the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. ADS is a powerful research tool and has had a significant impact on the efficiency of astronomical research since it was launched in 1992. Literature searches that would have taken days or weeks can now be carried out in seconds via the ADS search engine, custom-built for astronomical needs. Studies have found that the benefit to astronomy of the ADS is equivalent to several hundred million US dollars annually, the system is estimated to have tripled the readership of astronomical journals. Use of ADS is universal among astronomers worldwide, therefore ADS usage statistics can be used to analyze global trends in astronomical research.
These studies have revealed that the amount of research an astronomer carries out is related to the per capita gross domestic product of the country in which he/she is based, that the number of astronomers in a country is proportional to the GDP of that country, so the total amount of research done in a country is proportional to the square of its GDP divided by its population. For many years, a growing problem in astronomical research was that the number of papers published in the major astronomical journals was increasing meaning astronomers were able to read less and less of the latest research findings. During the 1980s, astronomers saw that the nascent technologies which formed the basis of the Internet could be used to build an electronic indexing system of astronomical research papers which would allow astronomers to keep abreast of a much greater range of research; the first suggestion of a database of journal paper abstracts was made at a conference on Astronomy from Large Data-bases held in Garching bei München in 1987.
Initial development of an electronic system for accessing astrophysical abstracts took place during the following two years. An initial version of ADS, with a database consisting of 40 papers, was created as a proof of concept in 1988, the ADS database was connected with the SIMBAD database in the summer of 1993; the creators believed this was the first use of the Internet to allow simultaneous querying of transatlantic scientific databases. Until 1994, the service was available via proprietary network software, but it was transferred to the nascent World Wide Web early that year; the number of users of the service quadrupled in the five weeks following the introduction of the ADS web-based service. At first, the journal articles available via ADS were scanned bitmaps created from the paper journals, but from 1995 onwards, the Astrophysical Journal began to publish an on-line edition, soon followed by the other main journals such as Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
ADS provided links to these electronic editions from their first appearance. Since about 1995, the number of ADS users has doubled every two years. ADS now has agreements with all astronomical journals, who supply abstracts. Scanned articles from as far back as the early 19th century are available via the service, which now contains over eight million documents; the service is distributed worldwide, with twelve mirror sites in twelve countries on five continents, with the database synchronized by means of weekly updates using rsync, a mirroring utility which allows updates to only the portions of the database which have changed. All updates are triggered centrally, but they initiate scripts at the mirror sites which "pull" updated data from the main ADS servers. Papers are indexed within the database by their bibliographic record, containing the details of the journal they were published in and various associated metadata, such as author lists and citations; this data was stored in ASCII format, but the limitations of this encouraged the database maintainers to migrate all records to an XML format in 2000.
Bibliographic records are now stored with sub-elements for the various metadata. Since the advent of online editions of journals, abstracts are loaded into the ADS on or before the publication date of articles, with the full journal text available to subscribers. Older articles have been scanned, an abstract is created using optical character recognition software. Scanned articles from before about 1995 are available free, by agreement with the journal publishers. Scanned articles are stored at both medium and high resolution; the TIFF files are converted on demand into GIF files for on-screen viewing, PDF or PostScript files for printing. The generated files are cached to eliminate needlessly frequent regenerations for popular articles; as of 2000, ADS contained 250 GB of scans, which consisted of 1,128,955 article pages comprising 138,789 articles. By 2005 this had grown to 650 GB, is expected to grow further, to about 900 GB by 2007. No further information has been published; the database contained only astronomical references, but has now grown to incorporate three databases, covering
SETI Institute
Not to be confused with the SITE Institute. The SETI Institute is a not-for-profit research organization whose mission is to explore and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, to apply the knowledge gained to inspire and guide present and future generations, it aims for discovery and for sharing knowledge as scientific ambassadors to the public, the press, the government. SETI stands for the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence"; the Institute consists of three primary centers: The Carl Sagan Center, devoted to the study of life in the universe, the Center for Education, focused on astronomy and space science for students and educators, the Center for Public Outreach, producing "Big Picture Science," the Institute's general science radio show and podcast, "SETI Talks" weekly colloquium series. The Carl Sagan Center is named in honor of Carl Sagan, former trustee of the Institute, prolific author and host of the original "Cosmos" television series; the Carl Sagan Center is home to over 80 scientists and researchers organized around 6 Research Thrusts: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Planetary Exploration and Geoscience, Astrobiology and SETI.
Guided by the astrobiology roadmap charted by the Drake Equation, the scientists of the Carl Sagan Center endeavor to understand the nature and proliferation of life in the universe and the transitions from physics to chemistry, chemistry to biology and biology to philosophy. Most of the research undertaken within the Carl Sagan Center is funded by grants from NASA, while SETI endeavors are funded by private philanthropy; the Institute's SETI Researchers use both radio and optical telescope systems to search for deliberate signals from technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. The Center for Education promotes STEM education through NASA and NSF-funded programs aimed at teaching and inspiring children, young adults and educators in physical sciences with emphasis on astronomy and astrobiology; the Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors program brings research to American middle and high school teachers. Selected science educators take a crash-course in astronomy and experience two sorties on the SOFIA modified 747 aircraft, operated by NASA and the German Space Agency.
In 2016, the Institute received a 5-year grant from NASA for an Institute-conceived STEM program for the Girl Scouts of America. In partnership with the University of Arizona, the Girl Scouts of Northern California and the Girl Scouts of America, the SETI Institute launched "Reaching for the Stars: NASA Science for Girl Scouts." This will develop a new series of merit badges based on a STEM curriculum for girls aged 5 to 18. Funded by the National Science Foundation, SETI Institute operates a summer internship program for college students. Research Experiences for Undergraduates is an 8-week summer internship that pairs students with institute mentor/scientists; the Center for Public Outreach brings the work of the SETI Institute and other leading research organizations, to the general public through its weekly radio broadcast and podcast – "Big Picture Science" and the weekly lecture series "SETI Talks." Big Picture Science is hosted by the Institute's Senior Astronomer, Seth Shostak and co-hosted by Executive Producer Molly Bentley.
The award-winning general science program engages the public with modern science research through lively and intelligent storytelling and interviews with leading authors and researchers in wide-ranging disciplines. The show mixes engaging and topical science with a dash of humor and proves the thesis that science radio doesn't have to be dull! The Institute's weekly colloquium series – SETI Talks, is an in-depth one-hour lecture featuring leading researchers from around the world in astronomy, aerospace technology, machine learning and more. Lectures are free of charge, open to the public and presented at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, California. All SETI Talks are archived on YouTube. Over 350 lectures are available on-line, indexed on the Institute's website. Instruments used by SETI Institute scientists include the ground-based Allen Telescope Array, several ground-based optical telescopes such as the Shane telescope at Lick Observatory, the W. M. Keck IRTF in Hawaii, the Very Large Telescopes in Chile.
SETI researchers use space telescope facilities, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, Kepler, TESS, the Herschel Space Telescope. SETI scientists are involved in space missions, the New Horizons mission toward Pluto, the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn, the Mars Rovers Opportunity and Curiosity, the Kepler mission, the TESS mission; the SETI Institute was incorporated as a 501 California nonprofit organization in 1984 by Thomas Pierson, Dr. Jill Tarter. Financial and leadership support over the life of the SETI Institute has included Carl Sagan, Bernard Oliver, David Packard, William Hewlett, Gordon Moore, Paul Allen, Nathan Myhrvold, Lewis Platt, Greg Papadopoulos. Two Nobel Laureates have been associated with the SETI Institute: Charles Townes, key inventor of the laser, the late Baruch Blumberg, who developed the Hepatitis B vaccine. Within the SETI Institute, Andrew Siemion heads the SETI effort. Seth Shostak is the host of Big Picture Science. Dr. David Morrison was the Director of the Carl Sagan Center, until August 2015, when Nathalie Cabrol was appointed as Director.
Edna DeVore is the Director of Public Outreach. The SETI Institute is headquartered in California. In 2015, Silicon Valley businessman Bill Diamond was appointed as CEO. On 13 Febru
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in La Cañada Flintridge, United States, though it is referred to as residing in Pasadena, because it has a Pasadena ZIP Code. Founded in the 1930s, the JPL is owned by NASA and managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology for NASA; the laboratory's primary function is the construction and operation of planetary robotic spacecraft, though it conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. It is responsible for operating NASA's Deep Space Network. Among the laboratory's major active projects are the Mars Science Laboratory mission, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, the NuSTAR X-ray telescope, the SMAP satellite for earth surface soil moisture monitoring, the Spitzer Space Telescope, it is responsible for managing the JPL Small-Body Database, provides physical data and lists of publications for all known small Solar System bodies. The JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility and Twenty-Five-Foot Space Simulator are designated National Historic Landmarks.
JPL traces its beginnings to 1936 in the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology when the first set of rocket experiments were carried out in the Arroyo Seco. Caltech graduate students Frank Malina, Qian Xuesen, Weld Arnold, Apollo M. O. Smith, along with Jack Parsons and Edward S. Forman, tested a small, alcohol-fueled motor to gather data for Malina's graduate thesis. Malina's thesis advisor was engineer/aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, who arranged for U. S. Army financial support for this "GALCIT Rocket Project" in 1939. In 1941, Parsons, Martin Summerfield, pilot Homer Bushey demonstrated the first jet-assisted takeoff rockets to the Army. In 1943, von Kármán, Malina and Forman established the Aerojet Corporation to manufacture JATO rockets; the project took on the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November 1943, formally becoming an Army facility operated under contract by the university. During JPL's Army years, the laboratory developed two deployed weapon systems, the MGM-5 Corporal and MGM-29 Sergeant intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
These missiles were the first US ballistic missiles developed at JPL. It developed a number of other weapons system prototypes, such as the Loki anti-aircraft missile system, the forerunner of the Aerobee sounding rocket. At various times, it carried out rocket testing at the White Sands Proving Ground, Edwards Air Force Base, Goldstone, California. In 1954, JPL teamed up with Wernher von Braun's engineers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, to propose orbiting a satellite during the International Geophysical Year; the team lost that proposal to Project Vanguard, instead embarked on a classified project to demonstrate ablative re-entry technology using a Jupiter-C rocket. They carried out three successful sub-orbital flights in 1956 and 1957. Using a spare Juno I, the two organizations launched the United States' first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. JPL was transferred to NASA in December 1958, becoming the agency's primary planetary spacecraft center.
JPL engineers designed and operated Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon that prepared the way for Apollo. JPL led the way in interplanetary exploration with the Mariner missions to Venus and Mercury. In 1998, JPL opened the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA; as of 2013, it has found 95% of asteroids that are a kilometer or more in diameter that cross Earth's orbit. JPL was early to employ female mathematicians. In the 1940s and 1950s, using mechanical calculators, women in an all-female computations group performed trajectory calculations. In 1961, JPL hired Dana Ulery as the first female engineer to work alongside male engineers as part of the Ranger and Mariner mission tracking teams. JPL has been recognized four times by the Space Foundation: with the Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award, given annually to an individual or organization that has made significant contributions to public awareness of space programs, in 1998; when it was founded, JPL's site was west of a rocky flood-plain – the Arroyo Seco riverbed – above the Devil's Gate dam in the northwestern panhandle of the city of Pasadena.
While the first few buildings were constructed in land bought from the city of Pasadena, subsequent buildings were constructed in neighboring unincorporated land that became part of La Cañada Flintridge. Nowadays, most of the 177 acres of the U. S. federal government-owned NASA property that makes up the JPL campus is located in La Cañada Flintridge. Despite this, JPL still uses a Pasadena address as its official mailing address; the city of La Cañada Flintridge was incorporated in 1976, well after JPL attained international recognition as a Pasadena institution. There has been occasional rivalry between the two cities over the issue of which one should be mentioned in the media as the home of the laboratory. There are 6,000 full-time Caltech employees, a few thousand additional contractors working on any given day. NASA has a resident office at the facility staffed by federal managers who oversee JPL's activities and work for NASA. There are some Caltech graduate students, college student interns and co-op students.
The JPL Education Office serves educators and students by providi
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university in Los Angeles. It became the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the third-oldest undergraduate campus of the 10-campus University of California system, it offers 337 graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. UCLA enrolls about 31,000 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students and had 119,000 applicants for Fall 2016, including transfer applicants, making the school the most applied-to of any American university; the university is organized into six undergraduate colleges, seven professional schools, four professional health science schools. The undergraduate colleges are the College of Science; as of 2017, 24 Nobel laureates, three Fields Medalists, five Turing Award winners, two Chief Scientists of the U. S. Air Force have been affiliated with UCLA as researchers, or alumni. Among the current faculty members, 55 have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 28 to the National Academy of Engineering, 39 to the Institute of Medicine, 124 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The university was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1974. UCLA is considered one of the country's Public Ivies, meaning that it is a public university thought to provide a quality of education comparable with that of the Ivy League. In 2018, US News & World Report named UCLA the best public university in the United States. UCLA student-athletes compete as the Bruins in the Pac-12 Conference; the Bruins have won 126 national championships, including 116 NCAA team championships, more than any other university except Stanford, who has won 117. UCLA student-athletes and staff won 251 Olympic medals: 126 gold, 65 silver, 60 bronze. UCLA student-athletes competed in every Olympics since 1920 with one exception and won a gold medal in every Olympics the U. S. participated in since 1932. In March 1881, the California State Legislature authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School in downtown Los Angeles to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California.
The Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School opened on August 29, 1882, on what is now the site of the Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library system. The facility included an elementary school where teachers-in-training could practice their technique with children; that elementary school is related to the present day UCLA Lab School. In 1887, the branch campus became independent and changed its name to Los Angeles State Normal School. In 1914, the school moved to a new campus on Vermont Avenue in East Hollywood. In 1917, UC Regent Edward Augustus Dickson, the only regent representing the Southland at the time, Ernest Carroll Moore, Director of the Normal School, began to lobby the State Legislature to enable the school to become the second University of California campus, after UC Berkeley, they met resistance from UC Berkeley alumni, Northern California members of the state legislature, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President of the University of California from 1899 to 1919, who were all vigorously opposed to the idea of a southern campus.
However, David Prescott Barrows, the new President of the University of California, did not share Wheeler's objections. On May 23, 1919, the Southern Californians' efforts were rewarded when Governor William D. Stephens signed Assembly Bill 626 into law, which transformed the Los Angeles Normal School into the Southern Branch of the University of California; the same legislation added the College of Letters and Science. The Southern Branch campus opened on September 15 of that year, offering two-year undergraduate programs to 250 Letters and Science students and 1,250 students in the Teachers College, under Moore's continued direction. Under University of California President William Wallace Campbell, enrollment at the Southern Branch expanded so that by the mid-1920s the institution was outgrowing the 25 acre Vermont Avenue location; the Regents searched for a new location and announced their selection of the so-called "Beverly Site"—just west of Beverly Hills—on March 21, 1925 edging out the panoramic hills of the still-empty Palos Verdes Peninsula.
After the athletic teams entered the Pacific Coast conference in 1926, the Southern Branch student council adopted the nickname "Bruins", a name offered by the student council at UC Berkeley. In 1927, the Regents renamed the Southern Branch the University of California at Los Angeles. In the same year, the state broke ground in Westwood on land sold for $1 million, less than one-third its value, by real estate developers Edwin and Harold Janss, for whom the Janss Steps are named; the campus in Westwood opened to students in 1929. The original four buildings were the College Library, Royce Hall, the Physics-Biology Building, the Chemistry Building, arrayed around a quadrangular courtyard on the 400 acre campus; the first undergraduate classes on the new campus were held in 1929 with 5,500 students. After lobbying by alumni, faculty and community leaders, UCLA was permitted to award the master's degree in 1933, the doctorate in 1936, against continued resistance from UC Berkeley. A timeline of the history can be found on its website, as well
