The three men who anchored the massively successful "Top Gear" automotive TV show will bring their large personalities back to the small screen Nov. 18, when Amazon Prime debuts the new series "The Grand Tour." Starring Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, the first season will include 12 one-hour episodes, shot in exotic locations, where the three men drive, discuss and destroy various motor vehicles to comic effect. As in "Top Gear," which ended a 12-year syndicated run when the BBC declined to renew Clarkson's contract following a series of friction-causing incidents involving the outspoken former auto journalist, "The Grand Tour" features globe-trotting hi-jinks laced with boyish jibes. It will be different from "Top Gear," the men said during a visit to The Times -- but not much. "Well, it has us three hosting it," Clarkson said. "(May) is slow and lost and (Hammond) is short and I am bombastic and tall, and fat," Clarkson concluded.

It was Halloween 1936 when seven young men convened in the San Gabriel Mountains to turn the idea of a working rocket from fantasy to reality. That effort helped usher in the Space Age and marked the founding of one of the world's leading centers for robotic exploration of the solar system, NASA's famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Caltech-managed exploration hub in La Cañada Flintridge. Monday was the 80th anniversary of that first exhilarating trek into the nearby foothills to light a liquid rocket engine. It was much like any other workday at JPL-- the sprawling campus leans casual, with scientists dressed in jeans and running sneakers or Halloween costumes ranging from a pirate to "Star Trek's" Captain Kirk-- but on this day many also remembered highlights from the past. The laboratory has seen major successes, including the first orbiting spacecraft in 1968, the successful launches of Voyager I and II in 1977 and the landing of the Mars rover Pathfinder in 1997.