JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology, the only NASA center operated by an outside agency.

JPL teamed up with Wernher von Braun’s rocketeers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency’s Redstone Arsenal to launch America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, on February 1, 1958.

The JPL campus is actually located in the city of La Cañada Flintridge, California, but it maintains a Pasadena address.

NASA has sent JPL developed probes to explore every planet in the Solar System, including Earth!

JPL is responsible for operating NASA's Deep Space Network, an international network of large antennas and communication facilities that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions, and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe.

There is a tradition at JPL to eat "good luck peanuts" before critical mission events, such as orbital insertions or landings.

JPL has an open house once a year on a Saturday and Sunday in May, when the public is invited to tour the facilities and see live demonstrations of JPL science and technology.

WISE will see practically everything but the kitchen sink. It will map the entire sky in infrared light, picking up the glow of everything from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies billions of light-years away. The space telescope will see hundreds of millions of objects -- enough to make astronomers dizzy (in a good way). Most of these objects will be making their grand debut to humans, since they've never been seen before.

WISE will tell us how big near-Earth objects and main belt asteroids are, and help us understand their composition. Knowing if asteroids are big, small, fluffy or hard will help inform future strategies for mitigating potential threats to Earth.

WISE's predecessor is the 1983 Infrared Astronomical Satellite mission, often referred to by its acronym IRAS. WISE's next-generation technology will allow it to see hundreds of millions of objects, whereas IRAS saw hundreds of thousands.

The spacecraft's coolant is expected to run out after 10 months.

Since objects around room temperature emit infrared radiation, the WISE telescope and detectors are kept very cold (below -430°F /15 Kelvins, which is only 15° Centigrade above absolute zero) by a cryostat -- like an ice chest but filled with solid hydrogen instead of ice.

After 6 months the spacecraft will have taken nearly 1,500,000 pictures covering the entire sky.

The WISE telescope will take an image every 11 seconds.

A hypersonic commercial jet could take passengers from New York to Tokyo in an hour and a half.

The X-43 hypersonic research craft was air-launched by a modified Pegasus booster dropped from a special L-1011 mothership.

In June 1961, Air Force Major Robert White flew the X-15 research airplane at speeds over Mach 5, and broke his own record in November, reaching Mach 6.7.

The V-2 rocket, first used in World War II by the Germans and later used by the United States in its early rocketry work, was the first manufactured object to achieve hypersonic flight in February 1949.

Hypersonic refers to speeds faster than Mach 5.

Guinness World Records recognized NASA's X-43A scramjet with a new world speed record for a jet-powered aircraft - Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 mph. The X-43A set the new mark and broke its own world record on its third and final flight on Nov. 16, 2004.