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.
The study of gas giants' behaviour has acquired an increased importance since the detection of many gaseous exoplanets.
Many important discoveries regarding gas giants have been published in Nature, from the detection of Uranus's rings to the source of Jupiter's auroras. As many gaseous planets discovered around other stars exhibit significantly different characteristics from the ones in our Solar System, science on giant planets has a huge multidisciplinary potential as a meeting point between the planetary and exoplanetary communities.
The Cassini mission (see also here) has extensively monitored Saturn and its system since 2004. On 30 September 2017, Cassini will complete its last manoeuvre to plunge into Saturn itself for the so-called Grand Finale. This commentary by Edgington & Spilker in Nature Geoscience describes what will happen and what kind of science we expect to study using Cassini as an entry probe.
An analysis of data from Voyager and Cassini demonstrates the importance of aerosols in the energy budget of Jupiter (and potentially of other gas giants), whose knowledge is essential for understanding the active physical and chemical processes within the giant planets. The paper by Zhang et al. is published in Nature Communications and, as such, it's open access.
Gas giants are believed to be formed by metre-sized 'pebbles' that aggregate to form solid cores, around which the gas subsequently concentrates. This theory, however, didn't agree with formation simulations that showed that the result was the formation of hundreds of Earth-sized bodies rather than a few gas giants. This discrepancy is solved by the study of Levison and colleagues, published in Nature and freely available for a limited time, according to which you need the pebbles to form slowly enough to obtain the desired planetary configuration.
Magnetic reconnection is a common process in astrophysical plasmas, but there are not many direct observations of its occurrence in planetary environments. The Cassini measurements presented in this Nature Physics paper by Arridge and co-authors detect an especially long-lasting example of magnetic reconnection, showing that this kind of phenomenon can lead to significant plasma loss at Saturn.
