The turn of the twenty-first century ushered in an upsurge of questioning of then-current views of the links between mantle convection and surface kinematics and volcanism. Since the early 1970s the mantle plume hypothesis had been the most popular explanation for volcanism apparently not explained by plate tectonics, including both large-volume magmatism and volcanism in regions distant from plate boundaries.

With the launch of Mariner 2 to Venus in August 1962, for the first time man reached beyond the confines of Earth to explore the rest of the solar system. The two decades that followed have appropriately been called the Golden Age of Planetary Exploration, for a succession of ever more sophisticated spacecraft has been sent throughout the solar system, visiting every planet as far out as Saturn. One spacecraft, Pioneer 10, has even left the solar system and is at the start of an endless journey through interstellar space.

The title of this book may sound like a topic for science fiction, but perhaps even more remarkable is the realization that the information presented here is the result of decadesof detailed scientific studies of the geology of Mars from multiple spacecraft missions.

A quantitative introduction to the Solar System and planetary systems science for advanced undergraduate students, this engaging new textbook explains the wide variety of physical, chemical and geological processes that govern the motions and properties of planets.

For many years, planetary science has been taught as part of the astronomy curriculum, from a very physics-based perspective, and from the framework of a tour of the Solar System – body by body. Over the past decades, however, spacecraft exploration and related laboratory research on extraterrestrial materials have given us a new understanding of planets and how they are shaped by geologic processes.

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.

The flight of the Mariner 2 spacecraft past Venus in December 1962 marked the start of a new era in the exploration of the solar system. At that time our knowledge of the terrestrial planets other than Earth (Mercury, Venus, and Mars) was largely astronomical in nature.

The giant outer planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (Figure 1.1)—are by far the largest planetary bodies in the solar system and together comprise 99.56% of the planetary mass. Although very far from the Earth, the enormous physical size of Jupiter and Saturn meant that these planets were easily visible to the ancients. However, the other two “giants”, Uranus and Neptune, are significantly smaller and so much farther from the Earth that they were unknown before the advent of telescopes, although Uranus is in fact just visible to the naked eye. Uranus was discovered by accident in 1781 by William Herschel (1738-1822) (later Sir William Herschel). Perturbations in the observed orbit of Uranus led John Couch Adams (1819-1892) and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (1811-1877) to independently predict the presence of a further planet, and Neptune was subsequently discovered close to its predicted position by Johann Gottfried Galle (1812-1910) in 1846. The mean observable properties of the outer planets are listed in Table 1.1. <...>