JPL laid off 550 employees Tuesday — the fourth round in a series of layoffs that cut a quarter of employees over two years.

With Congress cutting the lab’s flagship Mars mission, morale within the lab is slumping.

JPL, which relies on contracts for big missions, has few major projects in the pipeline.

Designing the system that would bring a slice of Mars back to Earth at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — the Southern California lab that pioneered American rocketry and the scientific exploration of our solar system — was her dream job.

As she worked toward degrees in mechanical engineering, she watched JPL launches and became enamored with the photos the lab took on Mars. She attended a JPL open house, which she said felt like “Disneyland.” She applied to work at JPL more than 60 time

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