Articles

Casey Dreier

This unique, comprehensive dataset includes the full budget history, by year, of every NASA planetary science mission and related activities.

Jennifer Vaughn

A look back at The Planetary Society's founding documents and the origins of the organization.

Emily Margolis

Americans were deeply divided over the value of the Apollo program. One member of Congress had a radical idea: open Kennedy Space Center to the public.

Casey Dreier

NASA used to spend more on travel for its employees at headquarters than it did on finding dangerous near-Earth asteroids. Now it’s building asteroid-hunting space telescopes. What changed?

Casey Dreier

How much did Project Apollo cost? Planetary Society experts answered that question by revisiting primary sources and reconstructing Apollo's entire cost history from 1960 - 1973.

Casey Dreier

Thirty years ago, President George H.W. Bush announced an ambitious program to return humans to the Moon. It failed. Today the Trump Administration wants the same thing. Can a failed lunar return effort help this one succeed?

Bruce Betts

A collection of before and after slider images showing how views of planets in our solar system have changed over the years since NASA was created.

Mike Blackstone

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a fabled history of planetary rovers. But how do you start such a program?

Sandhya Ramesh

Two weeks ago, Indian media reported a fire at the Space Application Centre (SAC) of ISRO in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Although it was a big fire, it was in an isolated building and no spacecraft was damaged.

Duane W. Hamacher

The Polynesian peoples' astronomical knowledge helped them colonize the vast Pacific Ocean.

Jason Callahan

Planetary Society Policy Adviser Jason Callahan summarizes his paper he presented at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress in Australia, where he examined NASA's low-cost Discovery program and how federal policies directed at higher education initially bolstered planetary science into a viable field.

Jason Wright

One of the reasons SETI is hard is that we don’t know exactly what we are looking for, and part of that difficulty is that we still aren’t sure of who we are. An astronomer and an anthropologist team up to explore how cultural myopia shape what we can find in the cosmos.

Paul Schenk

Planetary scientist Paul Schenk shares his story of working on the Voyager missions as a JPL intern back in 1979.

Casey Dreier

Five (Earth) years ago today, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landed in a dramatic fashion on the surface of the Red Planet. We look back at a mission that advanced humanity's understanding of Mars and provided a priceless return on a modest investment.

Felipe Cervera

Planetary Performance scholar Felipe Cervera brings a perspective on

Jake Rosenthal

Jake Rosenthal takes us on a tour of the history of discovery of our place in the cosmos.

Mark Hilverda

Whether you explore The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive online or at the Library of Congress during a visit to Washington, D.C., you’ll learn something new and have a deeper understanding of Carl Sagan.

Phil Stooke

Phil Stooke describes a research trip to the Regional Planetary Image Facility at the USGS in Flagstaff, where he discovered Jack Schmitt's proposed plans for a farside landing site for Apollo 17.

Jake Rosenthal

Looking back at Earth from beyond helps to give perspective on our place in the cosmos.

Jason Davis

A team of scientists at the University of Arizona continue their efforts to extract data from more than 90,000 images captured during NASA's Surveyor program. In the meantime, new first-look images and an animation have been released.