OtterKnow Kids Encyclopedia

Scientists at NASA Ames do many different kinds of work. They build and use some of the fastest computers in the world to solve hard problems. They test airplane and spacecraft shapes in special rooms called wind tunnels, which blow air really fast to see how things fly. They also look for signs of life on other planets and study what happens to the human body in space. Some of the robots that have explored Mars were designed with help from people at NASA Ames!

NASA Ames started in 1939 as a laboratory for studying how airplanes fly. Back then, it was called the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory. It was named after Joseph Sweetman Ames, who was an important leader in airplane research. When NASA was created in 1958, the lab became part of NASA and started working on space projects too. Over the years, NASA Ames has helped with many big missions, including sending spacecraft to study other planets.

• Hangar One at Moffett Field is so big that clouds can form inside it!
• NASA Ames has a supercomputer called Pleiades that can do trillions of math problems every second.
• The Kepler Space Telescope, which found thousands of planets around other stars, was managed by NASA Ames.
• NASA Ames helped design the heat shields that protect spacecraft when they come back to Earth.
• The center has its own wind tunnels that can create winds faster than the speed of sound!