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.
There is abundant evidence that Mars has experienced in its history relatively prolonged conditions that allowed liquid water on its surface.
Nowadays, Mars is mostly a dry planet with a thin CO2 atmosphere, but sometimes surface pressure and temperature values permit the presence of liquid water. Recent discoveries such as the ones presented below have given the strongest evidence to date that transient liquid water episodes are still happening on Mars.
This paper by Ojia et al. published in Nature Geoscience in 2015 (freely available for a limited time) exhibits clear indications of hydrated minerals where observed slope flow traces have been observed. This finding allows us to link these slope lineae to present water activity.
Massé et al. created their own Mars slope in the lab to study flowing processes at different conditions and presented their results in Nature Geoscience. Differently from Earth, ice melting on Mars can lead to a complex hybrid process that involves both dry and liquid mechanisms and carves the landscape.
A related News & Views discusses the results of the paper in more detail.
Still on water-induced transport, but glancing at a past when water was more abundant on Mars, Szabó et al. combine observations, laboratory experiments, models and terrestrial analogues to reconstruct the history of transport pebbles on Mars in Nature Communications, our open access publication.
