Explore Worlds, Find Life, Defend Earth: The Planetary Society.
Do you know what an astronomical society is, and what's its role?
Astronomical societies are groups devoted to promoting astronomy research and education.
One of the most known Astronomical Societies is The Planetary Society, founded by...
wait! We are going to tell you
everything about it in a while. Just follow me!
First: What is “The Planetary society?”
The Planetary Society is an American internationally active, non-government, nonprofit.
It is involved in research, public outreach, and political advocacy for engineering projects
related to astronomy, planetary science, and space exploration.
At the heart of every space, the mission launched and cosmic
discovery made is public support for space exploration. Without it,
governments would have little incentive to prioritize space exploration programs.
Citizens who understand the importance of knowing our cosmos are favourable of politicians who
support ambitious space programs and will stand up to defend space funding when it is threatened.
Even the commercial space sector relies on a strong foundation of publicly-funded space
activities and business-friendly space policies to allow for the foundation and growth of commercial
programs. With governments still at the heart of space exploration programs, the public plays a
significant role in global activities in space. At a certain point in history, we knew that
astronomical societies would have had a crucial role in scientific research.
What are its objectives? As stated on its website,
the objectives of The Planetary Society are: 1) Explore Worlds
2) Find Life 3) Defend Earth
Exploring worlds takes a long time because space is hard: it is a challenge.
When a government decides to take on a project like returning samples from the surface of Mars
or sending a probe to Jupiter’s moons, it doesn’t happen overnight. From planning a mission to
building, launching, and operating spacecraft, missions like these take decades to accomplish.
They need decades of sustained funding. Funding for space exploration still mostly
comes from governments, although private companies are increasingly active in space.
This means that the elected representatives make decisions about spending on space exploration.
It's important to make sure that government decision-makers and the people they represent
understand the value of space exploration. With the right investments and the world’s
best minds working together, we can ensure a bright future for space exploration.
As public citizens, our voices are critical in fueling and sustaining these efforts.
Also, it's likely we aren't the only life in the universe.
It won't be easy to find - it could be very far away, totally different from the life we know,
microscopic, or all of the above! But if there is another life out there, it’s worth looking for.
The discovery would forever change the course of human history.
To search for life beyond Earth, a few different tactics need to be pursued simultaneously. We need
to look for conditions where life-as-we -know-it could be possible.
The potential for discovery depends on how intensely the search is pursued!
The search for life must be embraced as a scientific priority, which is
what the Planetar society work to achieve. How does The Planetary society encourage this?
They provide free, accessible information to the public like their weekly Radio program
and podcast “Planetary Radio”, videos, articles, social media and The Planetary Report magazine.
They also give people tools to share space with their communities, like their weekly newsletter,
the Downlink and their free outreach toolkits. Take a look at The Planetary Society website!
Last but not least, The Planetary Society aims to decrease the risk
of Earth being hit by an asteroid or comet:
it helps observers find, track, and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets
it supports the development of asteroid mitigation technology
it collaborates with the professional community and decision-makers to develop
international response strategies to defend Earth from an asteroid or comet threat
An impact on or over a densely populated city could cause millions of deaths, and an impact on
water could cause massive flooding on coastlines. Any major impact would lead to widespread damage,
injury, and death, and would create unparalleled humanitarian and refugee crises around the world.
The good news is: preventing an asteroid or comet
impact is a natural disaster we can actually prevent—if we try.
But who decided to found The Planetary society?
The Planetary Society was founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman as
a champion of public support of space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life.
Its founding members were famous among the scientific community of the time.
Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (/ˈseɪɡən/;
November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist,
cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, poet, and science communicator.
Soon after entering elementary school, he began to express a strong inquisitiveness about nature.
Sagan recalled taking his first trips to the public library alone, at the age of five,
when his mother got him a library card. He wanted to learn what stars were since none of his friends
or their parents could give him a clear answer: “I went to the librarian and asked for a book
about stars; ... And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close.
The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light ... The scale of
the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There
was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.”
His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental
demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled
the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record,
universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence
that might find them. Sagan argued the now accepted hypothesis that the high surface
temperatures of Venus can be attributed to and calculated using the greenhouse effect.
Initially an associate professor at Harvard and later at Cornell, from 1976 to his death,
he was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at the latter.
He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain and Pale Blue Dot,
and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
The most widely watched series in the history of American public television,
Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries.
Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honours, including the NASA
Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal.
He married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia,
Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996.
Bruce Murray The world knew Bruce Murray as Director
of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, from the triumphant Viking landings on Mars, through
Voyager’s encounters at Jupiter and Saturn, to the start of Galileo to Jupiter and Magellan to Venus.
Discover magazine dubbed him “the Admiral of the Solar System,” a title for which he took
a lot of teasing from those who knew and loved him. Bruce’s great hero was Captain James Cook,
the great explorer of the seas, and he may have been secretly pleased to have
been given a title – even if entirely unofficial -- that recalled great explorers of the past.
As a young man, Bruce did not set out to become a planetary explorer.
He went through MIT through the ROTC program, and after getting his PhD in geology, he served two
years with the US Air Force. He then spent several years prospecting for petroleum for Standard
Oil. He found his way to Caltech where, in the early 1960s, geologists were beginning to look
at Earth’s neighbouring ball of rock, sometimes called the Moon, as an object worthy of study.
He began his Caltech career by using big telescopes, such as the 200-inch Hale telescope
on Palomar Mountain, to observe the Moon and Mars through the infrared to try to figure out what
substances lay on their surfaces. As the Space Age progressed and people started launching spacecraft
to get close to the planets understudy, Bruce was appointed to the Imaging Team for the first
Mariner missions to Mars. His skills in imaging, wrangling fellow scientists, and communicating
with the public led to his appointment as Imaging Team Leader for the Mariner 10 mission to Mercury.
Not long after that success, he was appointed Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
It is through its spectacular images of other worlds
that the space program has captured the hearts and imaginations of members of the public.
Few know that, without Bruce, there might not be so many wondrous images to entrance us.
He died of Alzheimer's disease at age of 81, on August 29, 2013.
Louis Friedman Louis Dill
Friedman (born July 7, 1941) is an American astronautics engineer and space spokesperson.
Lou, a native New Yorker, grew up in the Bronx and remains passionately committed to his
hometown baseball team, the New York Yankees. His college career began when Sputnik launched
the space age. Lou earned a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Engineering Physics at the
University of Wisconsin in 1961, followed by an M.S. in Engineering Mechanics at Cornell
University in 1963. He earned his PhD from the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at M.I.T.
in 1971 with a thesis on Extracting Scientific Information from Spacecraft Tracking Data.
Although the solar sail never launched for Halley's Comet,
the concept of using light to propel a spacecraft intrigued Lou so much that he
wrote a book on the subject, Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Flight, and led Cosmos 1,
the solar sail mission created by The Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios.
He also conceived the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment developed by The Planetary Society.
So it's pretty clear that at the base of The Planetary Society there is a lot of passion:
the founders themselves were people with a strong passion for science,
and in particular for engineering, astronomy and space exploration.
What about a normal person who would like to become a member?
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How to become a member? Of course, you can join
the Planetary Society community by becoming a member, with a monthly or annual membership.
There are a lot of simple monthly donations that make it easy to join at your
highest desired level. As stated on The Planetary Society website:
“As a member, you enjoy special privileges:
personalized membership card and social media donor badge
subscription to The Planetary Report magazine (choose digital or print)
member e-newsletters access to members-only content on planetary.org
opportunities to influence space programs through our advocacy campaigns
invitations to special events including Planetary Radio Live
your name sent to space on select space missions access to our exciting worldwide member
travel programs” One can also decide to
donate in order to support its projects, with a donation of a minimum of $5.00.
Planetary Radio: how to listen As we've already said, The Planetary Society
also owns a radio podcast that's Called “Planetary Radio”, which you can easily listen on Spotify!
The full archive is also available for free on the Planetary Society website, and new episodes
of Planetary Radio are published every Wednesday. It could be a good way to start your day!
The Downlink: weekly newsletter. The downlink is a weekly email with
everything you need to fuel your love of space and equip you as an advocate.
There you’ll find the latest in space news, shareable images and factoids,
ways to get more involved, and much more. Whether you’re a new space fan or a seasoned advocate,
you’ll find tools in this weekly newsletter that can help you share your passion
for space and take action to advance exploration.
You can just sign up for email updates at planetary.org/connect.
By the way, there are a lot of astronomical societies active these days, and The Planetary
Society is just one of them: if you're interested, you just have to go in search of them on Google!
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