Institutes & Facilities

Caltech

The California Institute of Technology is a private research institute in Pasadena on a campus of about 50 hectares, with six academic divisions. It began in 1891 as Throop University and took its present name in 1920. George Ellery Hale, a trustee from 1906, helped bring the physicist Robert Millikan, who led the institute from 1921 to 1945 and won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Caltech operates astronomical observatories including Palomar and the W. M. Keck Observatory, and its Seismological Laboratory is a leading source of earthquake information for Southern California.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

JPL grew out of rocket tests in the Arroyo Seco in 1936. Caltech founded it and has managed it for NASA since 1958. It builds and flies robotic missions, including the Mars rovers and the Voyagers, and it operates NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Mount Wilson Observatory

In 1904 Hale persuaded the Carnegie Institution to build an observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains, on the summit of Mount Wilson above Pasadena, at 5,715 feet (about 1,740 metres). Hale conceived its 60-inch and 100-inch telescopes; the 100-inch was installed in 1917.

Edwin Hubble joined the staff in 1919. In 1923 he showed that there are galaxies beyond our own, and in 1929 that the universe is expanding. In 1948 Carnegie and Caltech agreed to run Mount Wilson and Palomar together; Palomar’s 200-inch telescope saw first light in 1949.

LIGO

Caltech co-founded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and co-manages it with MIT. LIGO’s two detectors stand in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. In 2016 LIGO announced the first direct observation of gravitational waves.