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JPL? In March of this year I didn’t have the faintest idea what that abbreviation meant. I should have paid more attention to the Sci-Fi film The Martian: the astronaut who gets stranded on the red planet would not even have set foot there if it wasn’t for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And if it were up to JPL, the idea of a human on Mars won’t remain science fiction for long. I was lucky enough to work here during the last four months.

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file photo Martijn de Kok

JPL, based near Los Angeles, is managed by California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The lab does so much more than just rocket propulsion: it has been responsible for countless space missions such as Explorer 1 (the first successful American satellite) and the Voyager satellites outside of our solar system. All Mars rovers were built here as well. Right now, JPL is performing the final test on Mars 2020, the new Mars rover set to launch next year.

At the entrance of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo | Archive Martijn de Kok.
The Mars 2020 rover in the clean room of JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility.

One of JPL’s many buildings houses the control room of the Deep Space Network (DSN): nearly everything that’s man-made and further away than the Moon communicates via this room. Also called ‘The Center of the Universe’ around here, it’s very impressive to visit.

The view of the Downtown skyline from Griffith Observatory. Photo | Archive Martijn de Kok.

The group I work in is the Advanced RF and Optics group. I don’t get close to Flight Hardware (few foreign nationals do) but this also saves me a lot of effort and paperwork. My assignment is to design a mission concept that uses a novel inter-satellite communication system: partly in my field as an Electromagnetics master student at EE, but in some parts not at all. For example, I hadn’t expected I’d ever dive into astronomy and orbital dynamics!

The famous Santa Monica Pier. The weather is nearly always perfect for a day at the beach. Photo | Archive Martijn de Kok.

California is a beautiful state, and there is so much to do in LA that after four months you still can’t have seen and done it all. The Walk of Fame in Hollywood, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the Pier in Santa Monica, the Millennium Falcon in Disneyland and the view of Downtown’s skyline after a hike from Griffith’s Observatory are but a few of the highlights. But most of all I have met amazing people here, who have made the last four months here unforgettable.

With fellow JPL interns and the head of the research group. Martijn is the second person from the right. Photo | Archive Martijn de Kok.

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