Listen to an audio version of this page.

	Dr. Carl Sagan
	One of the books written by Dr. Carl Sagan was a best seller for seventy weeks!

Dr. Carl Sagan was a very famous astronomer. Many people around the world knew him because he wrote books and was often on television. The movie "Contact" was based on a book written by Dr. Sagan and his wife. Dr. Sagan's television series "Cosmos" was seen by more than 500 million people. Carl Sagan was born in New York on November 9, 1934. When he was a boy, he loved to read science fiction books. He was also very curious about astronomy. His parents taught him to search for the answers to his many questions about science. As an adult, Dr. Sagan continued to look for answers to questions about science. He was among the first to think that life could have existed on Mars. He believed scientists from Earth should study the possibility of life in other parts of the universe. Dr. Sagan helped design the Mariner 2 mission to Venus and the Mariner 9 and Viking trips to Mars. He also worked on the Voyager mission to the outer solar system and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. Dr. Sagan suffered from a rare bone marrow disease. The disease was responsible for Dr. Sagan's death on December 20, 1996.

A Question How many NASA missions did Dr. Sagan help design?