NASA Jet Propulsion Lab's New Chief Has Plans for Space Robots

Jet Propulsion Laboratory is kind of a misleading name. NASA's southern Californian center doesn't really make rockets or jets or anything propulsive these days. Nope, JPL builds robots that explore the solar system: Curiosity, Voyager, Galileo, GRACE. On July 1, the center's legacy becomes the responsibility of Michael Watkins. Watkins is a twenty-year NASA veteran who has been mixed up in nearly every important JPL project during that time.