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History

Only the Beginning: The First 25 Years of The Planetary Society

The Planetary Society was formed to demonstrate—simply by its existence—that the public strongly supported planetary exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life and to wave that fact in the faces of politicians and policy makers around the world. We succeeded immediately in that, becoming the fastest-growing membership organization of the 1980s.

But it quickly became clear that we were going to have to do more than just exist. To achieve our goals of keeping spacecraft exploring, seeing humans walk on other worlds, and searching for signs of life in the galaxy, to our goal of political advocacy, we added sponsoring research projects, publishing a magazine and a website, holding events to celebrate exploration, and preparing for the future by educating the next generation of space explorers.

In 25 years, we’ve been very busy and, we think, successful. What follows are only a few highlights from Planetary Society history.

POLITICS

In 1981, Senator William Proxmire targeted NASA’s SETI program for elimination. With his considerable persuasive powers, Society President Carl Sagan, convinced Proxmire to spare the government program.

In 1987, The Planetary Society published the Mars Declaration in the Washington Post, calling on the spacefaring nations to join together to send humans to explore the Red Planet.

Through a series of public demonstrations and technical partnerships, we promoted robotic rovers as planetary explorers. In 1997, Mars Pathfinder carried the rover Sojourner to the planet’s surface, and the age of rover exploration began.

Starting in 1994, we began agitating to send a mission to Pluto, and within a few years, NASA began to work on one. Then, in 2000, that work was stopped. We swung into action, marshaled public support, and pressured NASA to get serious. Over the next few years, we had to rise up again and again to keep a Pluto mission alive, and now the mission is set to launch early next year.

There is no doubt that without The Planetary Society, Earth’s efforts to explore other worlds would not have reached as far into our solar system and beyond as they have today.

PROJECTS

A comprehensive history of Planetary Society research projects (157 entries in a spreadsheet) would require a full book to describe. They are varied and numerous, but most can be filed under just a few headings: the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI), Near-Earth Objects (comets and asteroids), Mars exploration, and extrasolar planets (ESPs).

Our SETI program began with Paul Horowitz’ Suitcase SETI and has grown to encompass searches in radio and optical wavelengths from the northern and southern hemispheres of our planet. SETI@home, the largest distributed computing experiment on Earth, is perhaps our best-known SETI project.

When Earth-approaching comets and asteroids were regarded as only space debris, The Planetary Society stepped in and supported Eleanor Helin’s ground-breaking project to find and track objects that might someday collide with our planet, as one did 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. We continue this work through the Gene Shoemaker Grants, which are given to worthy amateurs and professional astronomers in developing nations.

Mars is the ultimate target for human space adventurers, and The Planetary Society has worked to develop the technology we need to explore the Red Planet. In the late 1980s, our Mars Balloon was developed as a flight component for a French experiment to fly on a Russian mission. In 1996, we started work on our Mars Microphone, which reached Mars in 1999—but unfortunately, the Mars Polar Lander carrying it crashed. The Mars Microphone will fly again! Count on it.

Extrasolar planets reached the network news only in the last decade, but The Planetary Society has supported ESP projects since 1982, pioneering both the astrometric search and the spectroscopic method that has since found more planets than any other means. In this decade, we’ve undertaken a transit search that will soon go live from Kitt Peak in Arizona.

What new exciting possibilities will catch our attention next? Stay with us to find out.

PUBLICATIONS

The Planetary Report was created to provide a direct conduit between space professionals and Society members. By writing directly to members, scientists report on their own discoveries, engineers lay out their spacecraft designs, and policy-makers explain their decisions. Independent consultants tell us that, for The Planetary Society, this publication is “clearly at the heart of the member relationship.” And we are extremely proud of that.

We’ve adapted to meet the potential of electronic media—particularly the World Wide Web—to convey information. Through our website, planetary.org, and e-mail newsletters, we communicate nearly instantaneously with members around the world and apply the same standards to those media as we do to The Planetary Report.

PLANETFESTS AND MORE

We’ve thrown the biggest parties on Earth for our wandering spacecraft: Planetfest 81 for Voyager 2 at Saturn, Planetfest 89 for Voyager 2 at Neptune, Planetfest 97 for Pathfinder on Mars, Planetfest 99 for the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, and Wild About Mars for Spirit. Thousands of people from around the world have come to Pasadena to celebrate these missions and to be there when history happens. From lectures in small-town libraries to hanging a solar sail blade in Rockefeller Center in New York, we are constantly finding new ways to involve people.

EDUCATION

Planetary exploration is, by its nature, a difficult, ambitious, time-devouring process that demands a belief that it is worthwhile to commit today’s time, energy, and resources to an endeavor that will only bear fruit in distant years. If you support planetary exploration, you must believe in the future—and in educating the next generation of space explorers.

The H. Dudley Wright International “Together to Mars” Contest brought 27 students from 16 nations - from Ukraine to Malaysia - to attend the World Space Congress, held that year in Washington, D.C. Art contests, experiment design contests, asteroid-naming contests—we’ve got the contest concept down, and they’ve been an effective way to get both kids and adults excited and involved in planetary projects.

In Red Rover, Red Rover, a partnership with the LEGO Company, we involved students around the world in simulated Mars exploration. That simulation became real in Red Rover Goes to Mars, when our students became actual Mars Exploration Rover team members and helped Spirit and Opportunity (named in a Planetary Society contest) to achieve their spectacular success.

MEMBERS IN SPACE

If you’ve been a member of The Planetary Society for several years, chances are that you—or at least your name—have flown in space. We first launched our members’ names on the Russian Mars 96 spacecraft that, unfortunately, ended up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But in 1997, Mars Pathfinder carried our members’ names to the Red Planet.

Our members’ signatures are orbiting Saturn with Cassini, while their digitized names are traveling back to Earth on Stardust and crawling across Mars on Spirit and Opportunity. Their names crashed into comet Tempel 1 on the probe delivered by Deep Impact and, of course, splashed into the Barents Sea with our solar sail spacecraft, Cosmos 1. Our long-time members tell us that having their names land on and orbit other worlds is among the proudest moments of their lives. We promise to keep doing it.

NAMING OF SPACECRAFT

Planetary Society members have left their marks on space exploration in many ways, including the naming of spacecraft. We have named robotic explorers such as Magellan, which mapped Venus with radar, and the Sojourner rover, carried to Mars by Pathfinder. Spirit and Opportunity are the two latest members of this naming tradition, given their sobriquets in a contest run by the Society with the LEGO Company as an extension of our Red Rover Goes to Mars partnership.

So, what will we name next? Stay tuned…..