Planetary Society engagement report
@exploreplanets - 239K followers on X
Measured over 7 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 28, 2026.
Engagement
Early reading. We have captured 7 original posts for this account, below the 8 we require before treating a median as settled. The numbers above describe what we have seen so far, not a finished profile of the account.
A typical post picks up 119 interactions against 239K followers, an engagement rate of 0.05%. Posts are seen about 5.5K times each, and 2.16% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 2.30% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 0.23 posts a day over the last 30 days, though only 20% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 7 posts sampled, 43% carry an image or video and 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 1.9K interactions, about 16x its own typical post. Only 7 original posts have been captured so far, fewer than the 8 posts we want behind a median before treating it as settled. Read the figures above as an early measurement of this account, not as a finished profile of it.
Measured over 7 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 28, 2026.
Where this sits in the catalog
At 0.05%, Planetary Society sits above the 25th percentile of the 204,956 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the below the median band, which runs 0.024% to 0.143%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.004% |
| 25th percentile | 0.024% |
| 50th percentile | 0.143% |
| 75th percentile | 0.678% |
| 90th percentile | 2.55% |
| 99th percentile | 82.4% |
This ruler is the whole measured catalog, not a size-matched group: it shows where the raw rate falls across every account we can measure, all of which are large. For a like-for-like comparison, read the size-band percentile above instead. See how the bands are built
Posting timing
This account posts most often around 15:00 UTC, and Tuesday is its busiest day of the week. The bars below are the catalog-wide pattern, with this account's own busiest slot marked. They do not show how this account performs at each hour: we keep one aggregate per account, not one per hour, so that measurement does not exist in our data.
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 UTC | -1% | 89K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 88K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 94K |
| 04:00 UTC | -5% | 76K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 75K |
| 06:00 UTC | -5% | 86K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 93K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 108K |
| 09:00 UTC | -4% | 124K |
| 10:00 UTC | -3% | 129K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 141K |
| 12:00 UTC | -3% | 154K |
| 13:00 UTC | -3% | 167K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 173K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 176K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 171K |
| 17:00 UTC | -3% | 159K |
| 18:00 UTC | -2% | 149K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 141K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 131K |
| 21:00 UTC | 0% | 116K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 100K |
| 23:00 UTC | -1% | 90K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 393K |
| Monday | +1% | 483K |
| Tuesday | -2% | 520K |
| Wednesday | -3% | 472K |
| Thursday | -2% | 430K |
| Friday | -3% | 447K |
| Saturday | +2% | 393K |
Formats this account uses
Its own posting mix on the left, and what each of those formats does across every account we track on the right. Only formats where the effect clears our publish test appear here, so an empty row is a format we could not measure rather than one that does nothing.
| Format | This account | Catalog effect | 95% interval | Accounts behind it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image or video | 43% of posts | +111% | +108% to +115% | 34K |
| Outbound link | 100% of posts | -41% | -42% to -40% | 32K |
| Typical length | - | +15% | +14% to +16% | 32K |
- 43% of this account's sampled posts carry an image or video. Across the catalog, posts with an image or video run 111% above the same accounts' other posts.
- 100% of its posts carry a link off X. Across the catalog, posts with an outbound link run 41% below the same accounts' other posts, so a large share of this account's output sits in the weakest bucket we measure.
- Its average post runs 642 characters, which falls in the over 280 characters band. Across the catalog, posts over 280 characters run 15% above the same accounts' other posts.
These are catalog-wide differences applied to this account's own posting mix, not a measurement of how each format performs for this account specifically. We keep one median per account, not one per format per account, so the second thing is not something this data can tell you.
Best tweets
- Jun 30, 202616x their median
118 years ago today, an asteroid exploded over Siberia, flattening an estimated 80 million trees. On June 30, 1908, an asteroid or comet roughly 30 meters (100 feet) across, entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded high above the remote Tunguska region of Siberia. The blast leveled approximately 80 million trees across 2,150 square kilometers (830 square miles). The explosion is estimated to have released energy roughly 1,000 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Had it occurred over a major metropolitan area, an entire city could have been devastated. Fortunately, it happened in one of the most remote regions on Earth, and no confirmed fatalities are known. Every year on June 30, the global space community marks Asteroid Day, commemorating the Tunguska event and reminding us that near-Earth objects (NEOs) pose a real, natural hazard. Detecting, tracking, and characterizing these objects is one of the best ways to protect our planet. That’s why The Planetary Society funds astronomers searching for NEOs. Investing in planetary defense today helps safeguard our world for future generations. 🌎
- Sep 8, 20264.3x their median
Today is Star Trek's 60th anniversary! Star Trek changed so much for so many, including us. Read on for a fun fact about our connection to Star Trek. ⬇ Did you know: Gene Roddenberry never publicly endorsed anything to his fans, until The Planetary Society. In late 1979 or early 1980, he broke that rule and wrote to the Star Trek mailing list about a brand new organization founded by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman to explore the Solar System and search for life beyond Earth. He told them Star Trek was fiction, but its idea was "very real and very important," and that it was this idea The Planetary Society was devoted to. Today, we still strive to support and advocate for a future that allows us to explore the stars and protect space science. We will do everything in our power to "make it so." You can download this image and read the transcript from our website: https://t.co/4VSIgatl4O
- Jul 31, 20261.7x their median
NASA wants to send Perseverance's engineering twin to the Moon — reusing hardware sounds like a budget-friendly, quick option. But would it actually save money? Our Chief of Space Policy Casey Dreier ran the numbers. Spoiler: it would still cost a fortune and it wouldn't be fast, either. https://t.co/pqyWpNvd0l
- Aug 26, 2026
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch no earlier than this Sunday, August 30. Its field of view will be 100x bigger than Hubble's! Below is a composite image comparing how much of the sky NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope covers with how much the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope covers. The white central square is an image of the Pillars of Creation from Hubble, while the surrounding image of the wider Eagle Nebula simulates how much Roman would image in a single observation. The actual wider image is from a ground-based telescope. Composite credit: L. Hustak (STScI)
- Jun 5, 20261.8x their median
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget just proposed new rules that would let political appointees, not scientists, decide which research gets funded in the United States. Under these rules, a senior political official would have to personally approve every single federal grant before it goes out. Peer review, which has been the gold standard for evaluating science on merit, would be reduced to just a suggestion. And if your research falls out of political favor? Any active grant can be revoked at any time, with no explanation required. We're talking about NASA grants, NSF grants, the funding that powers discoveries about our Universe and our planet. This rule was not written by NASA's leadership, and it works against the agency's own exploration goals for the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The rules would also ban entire categories of research outright, and cut off collaboration with scientists from other countries, even if those researchers live in the U.S. Researchers wouldn't even be able to use grant money to publish their findings or attend scientific conferences without getting special permission first. This affects everyone from PhD students to career scientists to all of us whose lives improve because of federally funded research. The public comment period is open right now, but this time, we're not asking you to sign a form letter. We need your actual words, your story, to make a difference. Identical submissions get counted as a single comment, so the more you write, the less OMB can ignore us. We cannot stress how dangerous this rule would be if enacted. But we can stop this if enough people submit their personal story of why peer-reviewed science is important. The deadline to submit comments is July 13th. https://t.co/42YYTxVYK2
- Jul 20, 2026
Fifty years ago, the spacecraft that would be the first to successfully land and operate on Mars, Viking 1, would also be a big reason The Planetary Society got founded. Carl Sagan, who worked on Viking, helped choose the landing site and knew Viking would prove something extraordinary: Mars robotic exploration was possible. He knew this spacecraft was going to change the tide. On July 20, 1976, Viking 1 landed successfully on Mars and sent the first photo back. Despite Viking's success there was a continued fight over its funding. After it landed, NASA's planetary program came under pressure as money and attention shifted toward the Space Shuttle. Bruce Murray, who had become JPL's Director just months before Viking landed, watched planetary missions get squeezed out as a result. He and Carl Sagan believed the public's fascination with Mars and other worlds deserved to be matched in Washington's budgets, not dismissed as an excuse to cut funding. A few years after Viking touched down, the two of them, along with Louis Friedman, founded The Planetary Society to make sure Viking's successors wouldn't be lost to the same budget cuts. Fifty years ago, humanity started a robotic journey to Mars with one lander. And it opened a door that robots have been roving through ever since. 1️⃣: The first photograph ever taken on the surface of Mars was obtained by Viking 1 just minutes after the spacecraft landed successfully. 2️⃣: Carl Sagan stands in front of a Viking lander model in Death Valley, California. NASA/JPL 3️⃣: Planetary Society founders Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Louis Friedman.
- Sep 8, 2026
The September Planetary Report is here! This issue covers the Roman Space Telescope's road to launch, the next wave of Mars missions, and how each mission's discoveries build on the last. Download the magazine and read it for free: https://t.co/a09WQbS8V8 https://t.co/RsO7Ruxhie
- Jun 27, 2026
Did you know asteroid Apophis will fly by Earth in 2029 and get closer than our geosynchronous satellites? It's big enough to level a city. Asteroid Apophis would fit neatly inside The Battery, a park at the tip of Manhattan in New York City. This image shows an artist's concept of Apophis in the park to illustrate its size in comparison to the rest of the New York City skyline. Finding and tracking asteroids is how we protect Earth. The Planetary Society funds grants to asteroid hunters around the world doing exactly that. Support the work: https://t.co/CcPHB2xNA7
- Sep 24, 2026
JAXA's Hayabusa2 flew within 400 meters (1,300 feet) of asteroid Torifune on July 5 and confirmed that it's a contact binary, two lobes stuck together. Tune in to Planetary Radio to hear what this extended mission flyby revealed about this rare contact binary and what it means for planetary defense. https://t.co/1GoVmjrxay
- Sep 15, 2026
NASA's New Horizons is poised to make discoveries about the farthest reaches of our Solar System, but two of its key instruments are in danger of being shut down prematurely. Starting Oct. 1, SWAP and PEPSSI will go dark. The spacecraft itself is healthy, with enough power and fuel to keep functioning until around 2050. Here's what's happening and how you can help save them. ⬇️ https://t.co/6MGfyvqUNW
Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.
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Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 119 interactions against 239K followers, an engagement rate of 0.05%. Posts are seen about 5.5K times each, and 2.16% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 2.30% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 0.23 posts a day over the last 30 days, though only 20% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 7 posts sampled, 43% carry an image or video and 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 1.9K interactions, about 16x its own typical post. Only 7 original posts have been captured so far, fewer than the 8 posts we want behind a median before treating it as settled. Read the figures above as an early measurement of this account, not as a finished profile of it.
- What is Planetary Society's engagement rate on X?
- Planetary Society (@exploreplanets) has an engagement rate of 0.05%, based on the median interactions across 7 original posts from the last 30 days against 239,385 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.05%, Planetary Society sits above the 25th percentile of the 204,956 accounts in this comparison. Those comparison accounts are all large ones, because our scanning cadence is weighted towards big accounts, so this is a ranking among peers of similar scale rather than a ranking across X.
- Does @exploreplanets have real engagement?
- There is not yet enough sample to rank this account against others of its size.
- When does @exploreplanets post?
- Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Tuesday is its busiest day, at roughly 0.23 posts per day across the measured window.