NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The deadly wildfires burning across Los Angeles have caused widespread devastation across Southern California, and their impact has managed to reach beyond Earth.
The fires have been relentlessly ravaging homes and infrastructure for the last several days and, at one point, they also threatened NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. This forced the space agency to evacuate the iconic laboratory — leaving the Caltech-managed mission control center for the Deep Space Network, aka NASA's communications hub for missions to Mars, Jupiter and other solar system destinations, empty for the first time since it opened its doors in 1963, NASA officials said Monday (Jan. 13).
