Bruce Betts

After 3.5 years, 18,000 orbits of the Earth, and 8 million kilometers (5 million miles) traveled, The Planetary Society’s successful LightSail 2 solar sail spacecraft will burn up as it reenters the Earth’s atmosphere in the next few days.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.