The wildfires currently burning in regions of Southern California aren’t just visible from space—they’re threatening scientists’ jobs on space, as well.

It should be NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena was evacuated on January 8 and it remains closed until Monday due to the outbreak of the fire in Eaton. The research center has so far escaped the flames. Even if it’s an emergency disrupted some of JPL’s data processing and, according to social media posts, greatly affecting the JPL community, the Deep Space Network was able to stay in contact with all of these active spacecraft throughout the evacuation.

JPL “was untouched by the fire because of the courageous dedication of our first responders. But our community has been severely impacted with over 150 JPLers losing their homes and many more displaced,” said Laurie Leshin, director of JPL. wrote in an X post on Friday. A JPL Facebook administrator confirmed this dire situation in a COMMENTS on Sunday. Most staff have been asked to work from home this week, and administrators have started a relief fund for the Caltech and JPL communities.

UPDATE: @NASAJPL untouched by the fire because of the brave dedication of our first responders. But our community has been severely affected with over 150 JPLers losing their homes and many more. Please consider offering support here: https://t.co/PGpNj2Z1Zf

— Laurie Leshin (@LaurieofMars) January 10, 2025

JPL is a federally funded robotic space exploration laboratory managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on behalf of NASA. It is also the home of the agency Deep Space Network (DSN), a web of giant radio antennas used to communicate with space missions. Established in the late 1950s and early 1960s, NASA’s DSN currently maintains contact with the Voyager probes, Mars rovers, and Juno probe around Jupiter. JPL’s Spaceflight Operations Center has been “operational and staffed daily since 1964,” ACCORDING at NASA.

According to evacuation notice The lab’s website posted on Wednesday, “JPL facilities, labs and hardware are secured and protected. Deep Space Network operations, normally conducted at JPL, have been moved offsite to a back-up operations center. In bit of good news, the DSN team maintained contact with its spacecraft throughout the evacuation, according to Space.com.

“Our amazing DSN team has gone above and beyond to make sure no bit of data is lost,” said Nicola Fox, Associate Administrator at NASA, during the 245th American Astronomical Society meeting taking place this week in Maryland. , as reported by Space.com. “It was a very emotional thing, the first time in 60 years that nobody was in the mission control office at JPL, because they had to move to the emergency center.”

Unfortunately, the evacuation of the research center resulted in few data processing interruptionsincluding some Near Real-Time (NRT) data (information available shortly after being recorded by a space instrument), data from Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) platform, which constantly measures surface soil conditions, and data from Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), which measures atmospheric components twice daily.

While the fact that JPL remains undamaged is a relief to the scientific community, it remains to be seen what will happen to the lab with the strong dry air. is forecast to continue through Wednesday.