The wildfires raging around Los Angeles have made plenty of headlines lately, though they are slowly starting to get under control. NASA was a part of that effort, tracking the fire’s evolution via the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3 (AVIRIS-3) as they raged through southern California. As they were doing so, they likely realized that these fires posed an extreme risk to one vital part of NASA itself – the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

JPL is one of NASA’s most prolific centers, nestled in the hills around Pasadena, California. Employees there are responsible for missions as wide-ranging as Psyche, which will soon visit the “Queen of the asteroid belt,” and Ingenuity, the helicopter that performed the first-ever powered flight on another planet.

Despite having their eyes set on the heavens, JPL’s engineers, technicians, and administrators still have to deal with earthly matters occasionally. It receives around $2.4 billion annually in funding from NASA, representing around 10% of the agency’s budget. However, over the past years, the center has laid off almost 1,000 employees out of the approximately 6,000 that work there. Those layoffs were mainly due to budgetary constraints and difficulties with some missions they were planning, such as the struggling Mars Sample Return mission.

But the LA fires, particularly one that started in nearby Eaton Canyon, brought home a much more immediate concern—a threat to the center’s physical survival. The Eaton Canyon fire, which started on the morning of January 7th in the nearby town of Altadena, expanded to over 10,000 in little more than a day.

As firefighters scrambled to contain the blaze, it began to burn developed areas, such as the northern side of Altadena itself. On January 11th, NASA sent a B200 aircraft over the area with AVIRIS-3 to capture an image of the first, which you can see in the headline of this article. If you look closely, on the left-hand side of the image, you can see three letters—JPL.

Using a very unscientific measuring technique based on the kilometer scaling provided in the picture, it looks like the first got within one single km of one of the world’s foremost propulsion research labs. Admittedly, there seemed to be a physical barrier labeled as the “Hahamongna watershed” between JPL and the fire, but given the drought that the LA region has been suffering through lately, it is dubious how effective that barrier might have been.

Luckily, as of this reporting, the Eaton fire has largely been contained and is no longer expanding. So it seems that JPL has been spared, at least in this round of southern California’s seemingly never-ending cycle of fires. However, almost 5,000 structures were destroyed in nearby towns – some of them undoubtedly belonging to JPL employees. 

While the center itself might have been spared, its employees will undoubtedly be dealing with the fallout of these fires for some time to come. NASA has started a Disaster Response Coordination System, where the agency uses its Earth-monitoring know-how to support other agencies dealing with disasters on the ground. This time, though, some of its best engineers and support staff might have to deal with their own personal tragedies before being able to help the agency that employs them.

Learn More:
NASA – Eaton Fire Leaves California Landscape Charred
UT – NASA’s JPL Lays Off Another 325 People
UT – NASA’s JPL Lays Off Hundreds of Workers
UT – NASA is Keeping an Eye on InSight from Space

Lead Image:
Map of the fires showing it proximity to JPL and downtown Pasadena.
Credit – NASA