Collection 

Advances in Planetary Science

Planetary science has long enjoyed an important role in Nature history.

Nature has published many important advances since the beginning of space exploration, from a seminal series of papers on Giotto observations of comet Halley, to the detection of the first Kuiper belt object, the presentation of the Grand Tack theory and the first results of the Huygens probe that landed on Titan in 2005, just to name a few.

This collection aims to highlight just a few of the discoveries in planetology published by Nature Research in the past three years. Five different journals contribute to this collection (Nature, Nature Geoscience, Nature Physics, Nature Chemistry and Nature Communications), demonstrating the widespread interest and the great diversity of themes presented in our pages.

Nature Astronomy, a new member of the Nature family set to launch in January 2017, welcomes planetary science as an important part of its scope and will be the latest addition to this great tradition.

This collection is formed by six main sections, each dedicated to a different theme or target: Comparative planetology, Mars' surface flows, Dwarf planets, Comets-asteroids, Moons, and Gas giant planets. The sections contain a small set of manuscripts illustrating the Nature output in the various fields. Different types of publications are represented, from standard Articles and Letters, to the various other formats, including News & Views, Commentaries and Reviews, which the Nature journals propose to the scientific community as companion pieces for a more in-depth analysis and discussion on the published original research.

Articles on the Research and Comment pages are freely available to access for a limited time.

 

The Pluto image in the header is from NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

Two dedicated NASA missions are drawing strong interest towards this new category of Solar system object, created by the IAU only in 2006.

The Dawn mission, after having visited the asteroid (4) Vesta for approximately one Earth year, is now orbiting the dwarf planet (1) Ceres. Dawn has enabled for the first time a close-up view of the two biggest bodies of the asteroid belt. The New Horizons mission, on the other hand, had just a fleeting encounter with its target, Pluto and its planetary system, but its remarkable batch of data has already radically altered our view of the most prominent member of the Kuiper Belt.

 

William McKinnon describes the milestones of the Dawn and New Horizons missions and the importance of dwarf planets for the understanding of the Solar System in his commentary published by Nature Physics, available for free for a limited time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just before Dawn's arrival at Ceres, ground-based observations performed by M. Küppers and collaborators, in a study published in Nature, present evidence of water vapour around Ceres, which they attributed to outgassing from some locations on the surface. The paper is complemented by its News & Views. This hypothesis was spectacularly confirmed by Dawn.

 

The polygonal structures observed in some regions of Pluto by New Horizons has immediately attracted attention, as they can indicate the presence of convection. This hypothesis has been analyzed and confirmed by a pair of papers published in Nature. The first, by Trowbridge et al., presents the evidence that convection is indeed the mechanism generating the polygons. The second by McKinnon and co-authors models the physical conditions that could match the observations. The related News & Views highlights the meaning of these studies for Pluto's geologic processes.