APL

When a spacecraft lands on Mars or slams into an asteroid millions of miles away, chances are it came from one of two labs: the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory or the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. NASA may be the face of American space exploration, but behind that iconic logo are world-class research centers shaping how we reach, explore, and understand the cosmos. JPL and APL are two of the most influential.

One of the more crazy, and extremely exciting, missions NASA is working on for space exploration is the Dragonfly spacecraft. This car-sized drone will explore the alien world of Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, by flying around it instead of driving like its Martian counter-parts. It just received some wind tunnel testing with a half-scale test vehicle.