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 numerous natural satellites of our Solar System belong to a great variety of categories.
They span the ocean worlds of the outer Solar System, some bigger than Mercury, to small rocks like Phobos and Deimos around Mars, with a wide distribution of sizes and physical properties. The following papers present a few examples of this diversity through the Nature family of journals.
This Nature Geoscience review by Katharine Johnson and Jeffrey Taylor shows how the image of an anhydrous Moon is incorrect, as an in-depth analysis of lunar samples and remote sensing observations bring evidence that water is heterogeneously distributed in our satellite and has different isotopic composition.
Titan, a moon of Saturn, is the only satellite possessing a dense atmosphere and has been the target of more than 100 close flybys by the Cassini mission. This study in Nature by de Kok and co-authors shows evidence that Titan hosts an exotic species of cloud, made up mainly by HCN ice, which has formed close to the South Pole. Thus cloud is generated by a sudden cooling of the atmosphere induced by seasonal effects. Caitlin Griffith further analyzes the phenomenon and its meaning for Titan's climate in the related News & Views.
Cassini discovered an outgassing plume with water vapour on the south pole of Enceladus, suggesting an internal ocean. Hedman et al. show in this Nature paper that the outgassing is regulated by tidal forces from Saturn. The related News & Views by John Spencer underlines the importance of this discovery for geological and geophysical studies. Both are free for a limited time.
