The Planetary Society

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 26. Chapters: Bill Nye, Bruce C. Murray, Carl Sagan, Christopher McKay (planetary scientist), Cosmos 1, Fiber-optic Improved Next-generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths, James F. Bell, III, LightSail-1, List of historical guests of Planetary Radio, Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, Louis Friedman, Planetary Report. Excerpt: Carl Edward Sagan (; November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He advocated scientifically skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Sagan is known for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. Sagan wrote the novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Russia, in today's Ukraine. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew." Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1951. He had a sister, Carol, and the family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean, in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the more liberal of Judaism's three main groups. Both Sagan and...