Introduction to Planetary Science

Preface
This textbook is intended to be used in a lecture course for college
students majoring in the Earth Sciences. Planetary science provides
an opportunity for these students to apply a wide range of subject
matter pertaining to the Earth to the study of other planets of the solar
system and their principal satellites. As a result, students gain a wider
perspective of the different worlds that are accessible to us and they
are led to recognize the Earth as the only oasis in space where we can
live without life-support systems. In addition, planetary science tends
to unify subjects in the Earth Sciences that are customarily taught
separately: geophysics, volcanology, igneous petrology, mineralogy,
geomorphology, geochemistry, hydrogeology, glacialogy, tectonics,
economic geology, historical geology, as well as meteoritics, microbiology,
physics, astronomy, atmospheric science, and even geopolitics
and international relations. Clearly, planetary science is well suited
to be taught as a capstone course for senior undergraduates and
beginning graduate students at universities everywhere. The exploration
of space is by necessity a cooperative enterprise in which
national borders, cultural differences, and even language barriers fade.
Therefore, we propose that planetary science should be incorporated into
theEarthSciencecurriculumevenatinstitutionsthatdonothaveanactive
research program in planetary science. Students will benefit from such a
course because it will expand their intellectual horizons and will prepare
them to contribute to the on-going exploration of the solar system.
This book evolved from a popular course we taught from 1988 until
2005 in the Department of Geological Sciences of The Ohio State
University. The course combined lectures with class discussions and
fieldtrips to the planets via videotapes. In addition, students solved
numerical homework problems and wrote short essays on assigned
topics which required them to use their own resources and to form
their own opinions based on factual information. As a result of the
progress in the exploration of the solar system that has already been
made, the planets of the solar system and their satellites are no longer
faint points of light in the night sky. Instead, they have become real
worlds with surfaces that contain records of their histories and of
their present environmental conditions. The data that are pouring in
from robotic spacecraft that are exploring different parts of the solar
system need to be interpreted by Earth scientists who are accustomed
to constructing realistic hypotheses from large sets of numerical data
and visual information.
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