The Planetary Society
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| Formation | 1980 |
|---|---|
| Type | Non-governmental and nonprofit foundation |
| Location | |
| Fields | Space advocacy |
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Members
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40,000+ |
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Key people
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Carl Sagan, Bruce C. Murray, Louis Friedman, Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson |
| Mission | To inspire the people of Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life elsewhere. |
| Website | planetary |
The Planetary Society is an American internationally active non-governmental, nonprofit foundation. It is involved in research, public outreach, and political advocacy for engineering projects related to astronomy, planetary science, and space exploration. It was founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman, and has over 40,000 members from more than one hundred countries around the world.
The Society is dedicated to the exploration of the Solar System, the search for near-Earth objects, and the search for extraterrestrial life. The society's mission is stated as: "To empower the world's citizens to advance space science and exploration". The Planetary Society is also a strong advocate for space funding and missions of exploration within NASA. They actively lobby Congress and engage their membership in the United States to write and call their representatives in support of NASA funding.
In addition to public outreach, The Planetary Society also sponsors novel and innovative projects that will "seed" further exploration. Two of the highest profile programs are Lightsail and LIFE (Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment). Lightsail is a series of three solar sail experiments.LightSail-1 is expected to piggyback on a future NASA mission. In June 2005, the Society launched the Cosmos 1 craft to test the feasibility of solar sailing, but the rocket failed shortly after liftoff.
LIFE was a two-part program designed to test the ability of microorganisms to survive in space. The first phase flew on STS-134, shuttle Endeavor's final flight in 2011. The second phase rode on Russia's Fobos-Grunt mission, which attempted to go to Mars' moon Phobos and back but failed to escape earth orbit.
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