Posted: Fri, Aug 30, 2013, 7:50 AM ET (1150 GMT)
Bruce Murray, former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a co-founder of The Planetary Society, passed away Thursday at the age of 81 after a long illness. Murray is best known for serving as director of JPL from 1976 to 1982, overseeing ongoing missions like Voyager while fighting for missions like Galileo during an era of budget cuts. In 1980, he co-founded The Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Louis Friedman as a vehicle for public advocacy for planetary exploration. Murray was also a Caltech professor who served on the science teams of several early Mariner missions to Mars.
