The Planetary Society celebrates a trio of space missions with “Planetfest ’21: To Mars and Back Again”…

The Planetary Society. Founded in 1980, The Planetary Society was the dream of Dr. Bruce Murray, Dr. Carl Sagan, and Dr. Louis Friedman. The three men were seeking to create a privately funded, non-profit organization devoted to the exploration of our solar system, as well as popularizing education in space science. I joined as an…

Celebrating two mighty machines of Mars…

This week it was official; the Mars rover “Opportunity”, the second of two solar-powered rovers that first landed on Mars in early 2004, was declared dead. Engineers at NASA/JPL-Caltech lost contact after a particularly nasty Martian dust storm last year, and contact never resumed. After 15 years on a hostile alien planet, the first rover…

My personal Martian chronicles…

Discovery. A few days ago, I turned on the news to finally hear something other than scandals, angry tweets, and a world increasingly going to hell in a hand basket.  There was a headline story about the planet Mars.   The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars almost 6 years ago, had discovered organic material on…