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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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1992, the organization conducted some of the earliest Mars rover tests in California\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The popularity of these projects among members encouraged the Society\u2019s founders \u2014 Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray \u2014 to explore more active involvement in space exploration.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Pathfinder Mars mission and a\u00a0microphone on the Mars Polar Lander.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Although the latter\u2019s mission ended in failure when the spacecraft crashed in 1999, the project was just the beginning of the Society\u2019s efforts to capture audio from other worlds. In 2005, we helped the European Space Agency process\u00a0audio data from its Huygens probe after it descended to the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The\u00a0goal of capturing sound from Mars was finally realized in 2021 when NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover transmitted the first sounds from the Martian surface.<\/p>\n
Another innovative Planetary Society project was the\u00a0Living 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n