Articles

Bill Nye

Today the U.S. House of Representative subcommittee charged with appropriating funds to NASA mandated a draconian cut of almost $2 billion from the space agency's proposed budget.

Bill Nye

The Hubble Space Telescope has recorded its millionth observation. The planet is designated HAT-P-7b.

Bill Nye

About a week ago, I attended the meeting of an organization I am excited about: the Alliance for Earth Observation. The conference was remarkable.

Bruce Betts

In the middle of the night on June 1, 2011, millions of passengers returned safely to Earth as part of the great conclusion to space shuttle Endeavour's last flight, STS-134. Many of those millions of passengers were part of the Planetary Society's Shuttle LIFE experiment. Five different kinds of creatures from all three domains of life are part of Shuttle LIFE.

Susan Lendroth

The Planetary Society welcomes home space shuttle Endeavour and the microscopic passengers it carried in Shuttle LIFE an experiment designed to test aspects of the transpermia hypothesis -- the ability of microbial life to survive an interplanetary voyage.

Emily Lakdawalla

I was driving home from the Mars Science Laboratory site selection workshop yesterday when I got a thrilling call informing me that I've been awarded the 2011 Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award.

Charlene Anderson

Remember SETI@home? The ground-breaking computing project is now taking a look at candidate Earth-like planets that have been detected by NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Mike Malaska

Citizen Science projects let volunteers easily contribute to active science programs. They're useful when there is so much data it overwhelms computing algorithms (if they exist) or the scientific research team attempting to process it.

Bruce Betts

The Planetary Society's Shuttle LIFE experiment is now go for launch on Endeavour's STS-134 mission. I came down to Florida for the loading of our tiny sample tubes into the CREST-1 (Commercial Reusable Experiments for Science & Technology) payload block.

Bill Nye

The Earth is important, and sometimes we need a reminder as to just how fragile it is.

Emily Lakdawalla

We're going to celebrate Lou Friedman's 30 years of service to the Planetary Society by mercilessly making fun of him at a gala

Amir Alexander

Amir Alexander explains more about the FINDS Exo-Earths project and how it will help planet hunters detect distant Earths in the depths of space.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today's Planetary Radio features Sean Solomon on the successful arrival of MESSENGER at Mercury. After checking that out, wander over to the 190th Carnival of Space, hosted this week by Paul Gilster over at Centauri Dreams.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Planetary Society is contributing this thing called the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE) to Russia's Phobos sample return mission -- it's basically a sealed puck with dormant microbes inside that'll fly to Mars and back in the return capsule, and biologists will take a look to see what damage the little bugs suffered during their space journey.

Charlene Anderson

Yesterday, after the earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, we sent out the e-mail message below and were elated to receive a response almost immediately from one of our members in Tokyo. We are also excited to report that Tak Iyori, the Executive Director of Planetary Society/Japan, is also safe.

Louis D. Friedman

The first full scale deployment of the Planetary Society's LightSail 1 solar sail was conducted on March 4, 2011 at Stellar Exploration in San Luis Obispo, California.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm pleased to announce the winners of the Planetary Society's

Charlene Anderson

A Planetary Society trifecta -- that's what Neil Tyson calls this episode of his StarTalk radio show broadcast this week. His guests include the Society's Vice President, Heidi Hammel, and its Executive Director, Bill Nye, (along with the Society's friend, Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers).

Emily Lakdawalla

We're coming up on the final days of Stardust's approach to Tempel 1. The flyby takes place on February 15 at 04:56 UTC (February 14 at 20:56 PST).

Bruce Betts

NASA announced that the Planetary Society’s LightSail 1 solar sail mission is on their short list for upcoming launch opportunities. The missions selected are CubeSats destined for piggyback launches as part of NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative.