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.
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