Welcome to new staff

Just a quick post to announce that The Planetary Society's staff is expanding! I am so excited to be able to say that. It's been a bit more than a year since we inaugurated our new website, and it has been a terrific success, so much so that our little Pasadena, California-based staff needed help. It is really, really awesome to have that help now! These three folks will be assisting us from their current locations.

First of all, erstwhile guest blogger Jason Davis is now a Contributing Editor. You can find his blog posts on space exploration -- including human and private spaceflight, Earth and Sun observation, and more -- at Jason's new blog landing page. I am delighted to be able to give him work doing what he loves (and does well), seeing as how I feel at least partly responsible for luring him from a perfectly good career as a systems administrator into the much less gainful one of a journalism graduate student (he's just finished his first year at the University of Arizona).

Behind the scenes, we're being joined by Web Editor Intern Tanya Harrison. Tanya is also a grad student, and like Jason, has returned to student status after spending several years at work. In Tanya's case, her work was being an assistant staff scientist at Malin Space Science Systems, serving on mission ops for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CTX and MARCI as well as all the Malin cameras on Curiosity. Plus she also worked on their website in both an editorial and technical capacity. She, too, has written guest blogs for me before, and she will be an incredible help to me in maintaining planetary.org.

Finally, we're adding Content Editor Mark Hilverda. Mark appears to be one of those people who can create clones of himself because he's a consulting geoscientist AND a web designer AND a photographer for whom all of this is not enough because he, like Jason and Tanya (and me and everyone else at The Planetary Society) just loves planetary science. He's already Web manager for the Planetary Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union, and now he'll also be helping out with content across our website.

One of the reasons we suddenly expanded our staff is because I'm going on a long vacation -- I will be leaving on Sunday and be out of the country for three weeks. I'm delighted to be leaving the website in the capable hands of Jason, Tanya, and Mark!