E.T. PHONED HOME, BUT GODDARD IS BRINGING MARS TO PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY
By: The Prince George’s County Economic Development Corporation
On Aug. 7, 1959 Explorer 6 was launched into space. This was also the first launch that featured equipment created by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, located right here in Prince George’s County. Goddard crafted the technology onboard Explorer 6 to study radiation, geomagnetism and radio propagation in Earth’s upper atmosphere. As well as to test a scanning device intended for producing images of Earth's cloud cover.
Ever since the launch in 1959, Goddard has been instrumental in numerous NASA space explorations. For example, in 1962 Goddard was heavily involved in the Aerial 1 space mission which featured the first international satellite as a joint venture between the United Kingdom and the United States.
In the 1980’s Goddard Space Flight Center created the COBE satellite to measure infrared and microwave radiation created in the universe millions of years ago. This mission earned Goddard's Dr. John Mather, the project scientist for COBE, his share of the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics.
Another great accomplishment of Goddard was the Landsat Mission which was the first mission to collect pictures of Earth's surfaces from outer space. It produced first-class images for 28 years and 10 months, making it the official Guinness World Record holder for "Longest-operating Earth observation satellite."
Most recently The Goddard Space Flight Center was the top contributor to exploring the surface of Mars. In 2011 Goddard was instrumental in developing “Curiosity,” a rover designed to explore the Gale crater on Mars. While successful, “Curiosity” still left several questions unanswered that NASA believes can only be answered by collecting data an analyzing it here. Thus, a decade later, Goddard developed critical parts of the Perseverance rover which landed on Mars in February of 2021. Perseverance’s mission is to collect samples from the surface of Mars and for the first time return these samples to Earth.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been doing incredible things for several decades. Now, we may finally have answers to questions that have been asked for centuries all over the world. Questions such as, “Is there life on Mars, can people live on Mars, and even when was Mars first created? All thanks to the amazing technologies developed at Goddard Space Flight Center located right here in Prince George’s County.