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.
Our knowledge of the Solar System's small bodies has greatly increased in recent years.
This new information is leading to a paradigm change, as the classic taxonomy becomes too rigid and the boundaries between the various categories fuzzier. The existence of a comet-asteroid continuum, already discussed in a Nature Geoscience News & Views in 2010, is currently one of the main topics of discussion within the small bodies community. An example of the richness of minor bodies' studies published in the Nature journals is shown in the articles below.
This Nature review by DeMeo & Carry puts into the broader context of Solar System evolution the variety in composition and characteristics of asteroids in the main belt (between Mars and Jupiter), which is much greater than previously thought.
Rings around other planetary bodies were an exclusive of the giant planets until this observation by Braga-Ribas and colleagues revealed unexpectedly a (double!) ring system around the Centaur Chariklo. This discovery, which challenges the standard ring formation theories, has been presented in Nature together with its News & Views, both available for free for a limited time.
The ESA Rosetta mission forms the lion's share of recent cometary science. Images from the OSIRIS camera provide an unprecedented level of detail and allow very refined studies, such as this work by Vincent et al. showing that the pits on the nucleus are a source of cometary activity and are formed by internal processes. The paper is complemented by its News & Views.
