Articles

Bruce Betts

Two years after launch, The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft is still solar sailing and paving the way for future missions.

Bruce Betts

We check in our last round of grant winners, who are helping to defend Earth from dangerous asteroids.

Bruce Betts

Bruce Betts and Sarah Al-Ahmed provided a guide to all total solar eclipses through the end of the 2020s, with dates and locations.

Bruce Betts

Your guide to total, partial, and annular eclipses: what causes them, what you'll see, and when the next one will happen.

Bruce Betts

Six proposals are awarded a total of $57,906. The winners come from 4 countries on 3 continents.

Bruce Betts

Our grants fund amateur observers, underfunded professional observers, and observers in developing countries who make vital contributions to NEO research.

Bruce Betts

Bruce Betts reports on LightSail 2’s status and looks to the future of solar sailing.

Bruce Betts

For Astronomy Day, Bruce announces his new book Astronomy for Kids, provides excerpts, and gives some bonus planet observing info.

Bruce Betts

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.

Bruce Betts

The Planetary Society presents a list of Frequent Asteroid Questions (FAQs).

Bruce Betts

Rocket science met planetary science in the California desert when PlanetVac, a new planetary surface sampling technique, was successfully tested on a Xodiac rocket.

Bruce Betts

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.

Bruce Betts

Seven very advanced amateur astronomers will help find, track, and characterize near Earth asteroids.

Bruce Betts

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.

Bruce Betts

When the Mars 2020 rover lands, we may finally hear the first audio recordings from the Martian surface.

Bruce Betts

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.

Bruce Betts

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.

Bruce Betts

For Asteroid Day, Bruce Betts reviews 5 steps needed to prevent asteroid impacts, as well as how The Planetary Society is involved in those.

Bruce Betts

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.

Bruce Betts

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.