The California Institute of Technology announces a $100 million gift to create an exploration hub.
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) will use a $100 million donation from the Brinson Foundation to create the Brinson Exploration Hub. The Hub will bring together scientists and engineers from Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, to work on a variety of novel scientific and engineering topics, including space exploration.
The scientific projects to be conducted at the new Brinson Hub will be selected through a competitive process and will focus on unresolved scientific problems with the potential to “generate scientific breakthroughs, expand human knowledge, and fundamentally transform exploration.”
According to the university’s announcement, those projects “could include robotic exploration of arctic shelves, small satellites and balloons that study the cosmos, the development of technologies to explore phenomena on the Moon and other planets, and programs to make Earth observations including rapid situational awareness after natural disasters.”
The basic intent is to explore unresolved scientific problems, using new ways of investigating the universe, “while closing the gap between university research, commercial interests, and national imperatives.”
The Brinson Exploration Hub will also give Caltech undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars the chance to participate in space exploration research and associated engineering and technology applications.
"The Brinson Exploration Hub will enable a new paradigm that will bridge academia, industry, and government, so projects can move expeditiously from ideation and maturation to implementation," said Gary Brinson, founder and chair of The Brinson Foundation, in Caltech’s news release.
"There is nothing like the Brinson Exploration Hub because there is nowhere in the world where you could find something that resembles this kind of exceptional relationship between an esteemed scientific university and the world's leading center for the robotic exploration of the universe," Brinson added.
"The Brinson Exploration Hub will open new vistas on the universe, on the solar system, and on our home planet," said Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum.
In addition to using established Caltech centers and facilities, the Brinson Hub will develop new relationships with business and industry partners.
"We want to reimagine how we do missions in the future, and this means working with commercial partners to advance the pace and lower the cost of scientific discoveries," said Caltech's Mark Simons, who will be the Hub’s inaugural director. Simons is the John W. and Herberta M. Miles Professor of Geophysics at Caltech; he previously served as JPL’s chief scientist from 2017 to 2023.
The Brinson Foundation was established in 2001 by money manager and investor Gary P. Brinson, who founded Brinson Partners, a Chicago-based asset management firm that was acquired by the Swiss Bank Corporation in 1994. In addition to regular support for Caltech, the foundation has provided grants for various other educational, public health, and scientific research programs.
