The Planetary Society’s role in real space missions

Since our founding in 1980, The Planetary Society has been working to advance space science and exploration by engaging and empowering the public. One avenue through which we’ve pursued this goal is by actively participating in missions led by space agencies around the world and through our own pioneering research and technology development. 

From funding early Mars rover testing to naming planetary bodies and developing sample return technologies, Planetary Society members have funded contributions to more than 20 missions over the past 45 years. 

Testing the waters 

In the early 1980s, The Planetary Society began exploring its potential role in science and technology projects. We provided funding for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and for a new technique to search for exoplanets. We also tested a novel concept for a Mars balloon that would fly long distances at low altitudes in the atmosphere of the red planet. 

In 1992, the organization conducted some of the earliest Mars rover tests in California’s Death Valley, bringing together scientists and engineers from Russia, the United States, France, and Hungary. This collaboration helped pave the way for the Mars rovers that would later explore the Martian surface.

The popularity of these projects among members encouraged the Society’s founders — Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray — to explore more active involvement in space exploration. 

Taking our place in space

Throughout the 1990s, The Planetary Society began developing our own space-based experiments. The first privately funded experiments to go to another planet were Planetary Society projects: a radiation-measuring device on NASA’s Pathfinder Mars mission and a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander. 

Although the latter’s mission ended in failure when the spacecraft crashed in 1999, the project was just the beginning of the Society’s efforts to capture audio from other worlds. In 2005, we helped the European Space Agency process audio data from its Huygens probe after it descended to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. The goal of capturing sound from Mars was finally realized in 2021 when NASA’s Perseverance rover transmitted the first sounds from the Martian surface.

Another innovative Planetary Society project was the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, or LIFE, which was designed to investigate the potential for life to travel from planet to planet. The Planetary Society funded the development of a biomodule to carry a selection of microorganisms to deep space and back.

A proof-of-concept experiment flew aboard space shuttle Endeavour in 2011, followed up by sending a biomodule aboard the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft in 2012, which was planned to have been a 34-month voyage to Mars' moon Phobos and back but unfortunately was destroyed shortly after launch.

Setting sail

One of The Planetary Society’s most ambitious undertakings was a project to build and fly our own spacecraft. Co-founders Lou Friedman and Carl Sagan were fascinated by the concept of solar sailing — propelling a spacecraft using giant sails that harnessed the momentum of sunlight. Through member funding and in collaboration with Russian scientists, the Society designed and built Cosmos 1, the world’s very first solar sail spacecraft. 

The mission ended tragically in 2005 when the rocket launching Cosmos 1 failed, but The Planetary Society’s solar sailing dreams weren’t quashed. The work continued, and in 2015, The Planetary Society's LightSail 1 spacecraft completed a successful test flight in low Earth orbit. In 2019, LightSail 2 launched and succeeded at using sunlight alone to change its orbit around Earth. 

Naming names 

While working on its own ambitious projects, The Planetary Society also continued to find new ways for its members to participate in agencies’ space missions. In partnership with NASA, the Society developed MAPEX, a microelectronics chip that carried thousands of members’ names to Mars aboard the Pathfinder mission in 1996. This was the first time a mission carried the names of members of the public to another planet — the first of many. 

The Planetary Society has helped send names, messages, images, and good wishes aboard more than a dozen spacecraft. To date, we've sent our members and supporters to the Moon, Venus, Mars, Saturn, asteroids, comets, Pluto, and out of the Solar System entirely. In some cases, we built the hardware used to carry the names into space. In others, we partnered with other groups to collect names.

The Planetary Society also has a long history of engaging the public in choosing the names of spacecraft and celestial bodies. We helped run contests to choose the names of the Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Soujourner, the asteroid Bennu, and Earth’s quasi-moon Cardea.

Many of those naming contests specifically engaged students, and getting kids involved in space missions has been an important part of The Planetary Society’s work. One notable example of this was Red Rover Goes to Mars, a project in the early 2000s in which we gave teams of students opportunities to directly interact with Mars rovers — operating the camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor mission, operating the prototype FIDO rover, and even working inside mission operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory while Spirit and Opportunity explored the red planet.

The Planetary Society has served many times as an official education and outreach partner for space missions, oftentimes in the form of collecting names, sending messages aboard the spacecraft, or naming a target. In one partnership, for the Mastcam-Z camera on NASA's Perseverance rover, we also had the opportunity to design a series of icons on the primary image calibration target for the camera, which is now on Mars.

At the cutting-edge

In recent decades, The Planetary Society has engaged members to fund the development of new technologies with the potential to advance space exploration. 

One such project was PlanetVac, which the Society developed in collaboration with Honeybee Robotics. PlanetVac is a low-cost, high-reliability sample collection system designed to increase the science return from missions to other worlds. PlanetVac works by firing a blast of gas into the surface, stirring sample material into a collection container for onboard analysis or return to Earth. 

In 2013, Planetary Society members helped fund a lab test of PlanetVac in a simulated Martian atmosphere, and in 2018 helped Honeybee take the technology out on a real-world test flight in California's Mojave Desert, where it successfully collected 332 grams of simulated Martian soil. These tests proved that PlanetVac was suitable for real missions, and the technology is now in space. PlanetVac is part of Blue Origin’s Blue Ghost mission to the Moon, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. A modified PlanetVac will also fly to Mars’ moon Phobos aboard Japan's Martian Moons eXplorer mission, or MMX, due to launch in 2026. 

The Planetary Society also worked with Honeybee Robotics on the Planetary Deep Drill project, which aims to create lightweight, portable drills capable of probing deep beneath planetary surfaces. By funding field tests in California and Greenland, the Society has helped prove the drill’s potential for future missions. Another technology we’ve helped test is Laser Bees, which uses laser ablation as a method for deflecting asteroids. The Planetary Society and our members helped fund original research to test this technique in the laboratory, demonstrating that laser ablation is a promising deflection capability and significantly improving theoretical models to advance future work on the technology.

The future is bright

The Planetary Society’s science and technology program continues to this day to fund innovative projects that will no doubt help shape the future of space science and exploration. In 2022, The Planetary Society launched the STEP (Science and Technology Empowered by the Public) grant program. These grants are funding the development of a new citizen science SETI project, a novel technique to study near-Earth asteroids, research on growing edible plants in simulated deep-space conditions, and the study of salty lakes on Earth that may share similarities with oceans of other worlds.

As space exploration continues to uncover new things about the Cosmos and our place within it, you can be sure that The Planetary Society and our members will have a role to play.