Members' Names in Space

When the Cassini mission to Saturn was launched in October 1997, it carried with it the signatures of over 600,000 well-wishers on a CD-ROM disk. Planetary Society volunteers spent thousands of hours to collect and scan the signatures for their journey into space.

Planetary Society members names' were supplied on microchip to the National Space Society, to be placed aboard the spacecraft "Stardust", which intercepted Comet Wild-2 in January 2004 as the first U.S. mission to robotically collect comet dust and volatile extraterrestrial samples. This mission found a new class of organics in comet dust. Comets are a major source of the water and carbon found on our moon; therefore having a better understanding of comets helps scientists learn what natural resources to search for on the moon.