On September 23, 1958, the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration assumed control of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, transferring it from Army jurisdiction. JPL, born from rocket experiments in the 1930s and 1940s, became NASA's center for robotic exploration, eventually building and operating missions to every planet in the solar system.
JPL's roots traced back to a scruffy group of Caltech students and engineers who, in the 1930s, tested rocket engines in the dry Arroyo Seco riverbed north of Pasadena after an explosion got them banned from campus. By the 1950s the lab had matured into a serious Army research center, building the Corporal and Sergeant missile programs and, crucially, the Explorer 1 satellite that answered Sputnik in early 1958.
When Congress created NASA that same year to consolidate America's fractured space efforts, JPL's expertise in guidance systems and deep-space communication made it a natural transfer from the Army to the new civilian agency. The handover on September 23 was largely administrative, but it set JPL on a very different path.
Instead of missiles, the lab would spend the coming decades building the robotic emissaries of American space exploration, Mariner, Viking, Voyager, the Mars rovers, and Cassini among them, extending human sight to the edges of the solar system and beyond.