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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Your guide to total, partial, and annular eclipses: what causes them, what you'll see, and when the next one will happen.
Six proposals are awarded a total of $57,906. The winners come from 4 countries on 3 continents.
Our grants fund amateur observers, underfunded professional observers, and observers in developing countries who make vital contributions to NEO research.
Bruce Betts reports on LightSail 2’s status and looks to the future of solar sailing.
For Astronomy Day, Bruce announces his new book Astronomy for Kids, provides excerpts, and gives some bonus planet observing info.
A collection of before and after slider images showing how views of planets in our solar system have changed over the years since NASA was created.
The Planetary Society presents a list of Frequent Asteroid Questions (FAQs).
Rocket science met planetary science in the California desert when PlanetVac, a new planetary surface sampling technique, was successfully tested on a Xodiac rocket.
In 2018, The Planetary Society awarded $59,300 as part of its Gene Shoemaker Near Earth Object (NEO) Grant Program. The grants were made to a group of international researchers to find, track, and characterize potentially hazardous NEOs.
Seven very advanced amateur astronomers will help find, track, and characterize near Earth asteroids.
Bruce Betts provides a guide to all total solar eclipses through the end of the 2020s, with dates and locations.
The Mars 2020 mission will carry microphones in its EDL package and its SuperCam instrument, which will enable us to finally hear the sounds of Mars. The Planetary Society has been trying to get microphones to Mars for 20 years and is ecstatic that these will fly.
When the Mars 2020 rover lands, we may finally hear the first audio recordings from the Martian surface.
The Planetary Deep Drill is being tested in a California gypsum mine. Several Planetary Society staff took a road trip to visit the ongoing Honeybee Robotics test of this prototype robotic drill that could one day drill hundreds of meters into planetary ices.
An introduction to the Mastcam-Z stereo imager on the Mars 2020 rover, and brief reporting and reflections on team meetings, science instruments, and the exciting future of The Planetary Society covering the entire lifetime of this instrument, from design to Mars images.
For Asteroid Day, Bruce Betts reviews 5 steps needed to prevent asteroid impacts, as well as how The Planetary Society is involved in those.
In 2015, The Planetary Society awarded $53,250 as part of its Gene Shoemaker Near Earth Object (NEO) Grant Program. The grants were made to a group of international researchers to find, track, and characterize potentially hazardous NEOs.
The six winners of the 2015 Shoemaker NEO Grants will use the grants to upgrade their observatories to improve their abilities to study potentially dangerous asteroids.
Thanks to a new focal reducer and re-aluminized mirror from a Shoemaker NEO grant, a 0.81-meter telescope in Italy is performing astrometric follow-up observations and physical studies of asteroids.
Camera purchased with the support of a 2009 Shoemaker NEO Grant is now on a new telescope providing follow-up measurements for even fainter near-Earth objects.
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