Just thought I'd end this month with these photos that I took during a tour I attended at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Pasadena, California yesterday. The pics above and below are of the 'Skycrane' descent stage that will be used to gently lower the Mars 2020 rover onto the surface of the Red Planet—just like Curiosity before her almost six years ago—in February of 2021 (the rover will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in the summer of 2020). Towards the right of the image directly below, you'll see the circular cruise stage for Mars 2020 also undergoing construction inside JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF). The rover itself will begin official assembly inside the SAF later this year. And of course, I couldn't overlook the obligatory snapshots that I took inside the historic Space Flight Operations Facility, as well as the full-size replica of the Voyager spacecraft in the Von Kármán Auditorium.
Three of these pics were taken with my Nikon D3300 DSLR camera. Guess which ones? Happy Thursday!
LINK: Additional photos that I took at the May 2018 JPL Tour
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