NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), located in Greenbelt, Maryland near Washington DC, is NASA's largest field center and the agency's primary hub for Earth observation, space science, and astrophysics missions, employing roughly 10,000 civil servants and contractors.

Goddard manages some of NASA's most iconic programs: the Hubble Space Telescope (launched 1990, with Goddard managing all five servicing missions and ongoing science operations), the James Webb Space Telescope (launched December 2021, which Goddard led as primary center through a decade of development to deliver the most powerful astronomical observatory ever built), and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (in development).

In Earth science, Goddard manages the Landsat long-term satellite imagery archive (jointly with USGS, providing the world's longest continuous record of Earth's surface from space since 1972), the Terra and Aqua EOS (Earth Observing System) missions, and serves as the science and operations center for NOAA's GOES geostationary weather satellites. For heliophysics, Goddard leads the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission studying magnetic reconnection and TESS (the exoplanet-finding satellite).

The center also manages the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for suborbital rocket launches and CubeSat missions, and operates a dedicated cleanroom facility for building and testing large space telescopes — one of few in the world capable of housing JWST-scale optics.