Thee NASA Ames Research Center is one of NASA's ten field installations. Located at Moffett Field, near Sunnyvale and Mountain View, the center was founded on December 20, 1939, as an aircraft research laboratory for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and in 1958 it became part of the then-new National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Ames has seen major changes over the past two decades and in effect has reinvented itself. Today, Ames still plays an important role in aeronautics research, but it also conducts scientific and engineering research in support of a broad range of NASA missions. It is NASA's lead center for supercomputing, and also conducts research and technology development in intelligent systems and robotics, fundamental space biology (also called astrobiology), nanotechnology, thermal protection systems (such as the protective tiles on the space shuttle), and human factors research.