Planetary Geology

Paul K Byrne, Planetary Research Group, Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh,
NC, United States
© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction 1
The Geology of the Solar System 1
A Brief History of Planets 1
Our Current Understanding of the Solar System 2
The rocky planets 2
The Giant planets and their moons 3
Dwarf planets and minor bodies 5
Migrating Planets? 6
Earth as a Natural Laboratory 7
Planetary Geology Techniques 7
Remote sensing 7
Laboratory analyses 8
Modeling 9
Fieldwork 9
Geological Processes Across the Solar System 9
Comparative Planetology 12
Milestones in Planetary Geology 13
Synthesis and Outlook 14
Trends Across the Solar System 14
Next Steps and Future Directions 14
Further Reading 15

Introduction

Planetary geology or, alternatively, astrogeology, is the study of the landforms, processes, and materials of solid-surface celestial
bodies including planets, their satellites, and minor bodies (asteroids and comets). Although the prefix geo- pertains to Earth, and
prefixes for other worlds sometime feature, e.g., areo- for Mars, it has become common to use the word “geology” for all bodies in
the Solar System, and even beyond. And in this prefix lies the core of the discipline: the application of knowledge gained from
centuries of study on Earth to understand better the properties, formation, and evolution of other worlds.
This approach is termed “comparative planetology,” and allows us to at least grasp why other bodies look the way they do,
without requiring that we dispatch often prohibitively expensive robotic or crewed missions to investigate. Indeed, comparative
planetology is a remarkably powerful tool: not only can geological knowledge of Earth be extended to other worlds, but lessons
learned from their surfaces and interiors can also be applied to better understand Earth. Doing this is particularly useful when trying
to understand the geology of early Earth, which has long since been erased by plate tectonics and erosion—but is a period of time
relatively well preserved elsewhere in the Solar System, especially on airless bodies like the Moon and Mercury.
The goal of this article is to provide a primer on the broad discipline of planetary geology, to introduce its basic approaches and
methods to those for whom planetary science is an exotic or even unfamiliar topic. Equally, I hope to show how useful the study of
other planetary bodies can be in helping to understand our own world—which is another planet, after all. The article starts with an
overview of the Solar System and its constituents, and how thinking about its structure has evolved through time. The tools modern
planetary geology utilizes, which in many cases are the very same used in studying the geology of Earth, are then reviewed. Next, the
key milestones in the field of planetary geology are described—from the first scientific recognition of worlds beyond our own;
through the first successful interplanetary flyby of, landing on, and human visit to another planetary body; to the discovery of rocky
worlds in other planetary systems. Finally, I discuss what next steps we might take in furthering our understanding of geology as a
whole—a specialty that, 1 day, may be sufficiently encompassing of worlds in addition to our own that the word “planetary” will no
longer be needed.

The Geology of the Solar System

A Brief History of Planets
Humankind has been aware of other planetary bodies for as long as our species has existed. The Moon is the obvious example—its
formation about 4.5 billion years ago predates that of any life on Earth. But even if early humans did not understand planets in the

Encyclopedia of Geology, 2nd edition https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102908-4.00125-9 1

2 Planetary Geology

sense we do now, the motion of these recurring points of light in the sky underpinned mythology and religion for peoples across the
globe over countless millennia. Indeed, even the word “planet” derives from the ancient Greek word planet- (literally, “wanderer”),
for our celestial neighbors were seen to move independently of the fixed backdrop of stars.
The advent of the telescope in the early 1600s laid the foundation for a new era of studying these wandering stars. Now
understood to move in fixed orbits—initially, it was thought, around Earth, and then later around the Sun as the heliocentric model
became ever more adopted—the term “planet” was applied to six recognized bodies: by increasing distance to the Sun, these
included Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (with the Moon by then classified as a satellite of Earth, although it
already been considered as functionally a planet for millennia).
This list continued to grow, encompassing several large bodies in the region of space between Mars and Jupiter—Vesta, Juno,
Ceres, and Pallas—and the newly discovered Uranus, added to this category in 1781. With improved telescope technology, bodies
such as Vesta were determined to be substantially smaller than the other worlds classified as planets, and were given a new term:
asteroid (Greek for “star-like”). Until 1930, and again from 2006, then, there were eight recognized planets in the Solar System—
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930, rounding out the
nine “classical” planets.
The subsequent discovery in the late 20th century of additional, similarly sized bodies in the region of space beyond Neptune led
the International Astronomical Union to formally reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006; Ceres, the largest body in what is today
understood to be the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is also now categorized as a dwarf planet. Of note, the term dwarf
planet is accorded on the basis of size (and, strictly speaking, gravitational potential), but does not imply any particular geological
or geophysical properties.
There is now an increasing number of confirmed planets in orbit around other stars; these are known as extrasolar planets, or
exoplanets. More than 4100 are known at time of writing, but a rough rule of thumb is that there is at least one planet for every other
star in the Milky Way. It follows, then, that the true number of planets in the galaxy is likely in the tens to hundreds of billions.

Our Current Understanding of the Solar System

The 20th century set the stage for our present view of our immediate celestial neighborhood. Through continued telescope
observations, both from the ground and, later, in space, as well as with a fleet of robotic spacecraft, we now have a firm grasp on
the structure and inventory of the Solar System (although, as will be described, some considerable uncertainty remains). But it was
with spacecraft, in particular, that the planets of our Solar System ceased to be lights in the night sky and the exclusive purview of
astronomers, and began to transition into fully fledged worlds of their own.

The rocky planets

At the heart of our planetary system is the Sun, a middle-aged yellow dwarf star that represents more than 99.8% of the mass of the
entire Solar System. The Sun is primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, although we know from spectral data that our host star
also comprises the same elements that make up the rocky planets of the inner Solar System (Fig. 1), in about the same abundances.
This part of our planetary system includes the smallest rocky (or terrestrial) planet, Mercury (Fig. 1A). With a core that occupies
more than half the planetary volume (the planet’s core–mantle boundary is about 420 km under the surface), Mercury can be
thought of as a molten iron planet wrapped in a thin silicate blanket. Indeed, Mercury and Earth are the only two inner Solar System
worlds that generate their own magnetic fields. Mercury’s impact-scarred surface resembles the ancient lunar highlands, although
the innermost planet had a long history of planet-wide effusive, basaltic volcanic activity before its interior started to cool and
contract about 3.8 billion years ago. This contraction shut off major volcanism at the surface, with most geological activity since
then being dominated by continued planetary shrinking and impact bombardment.
With an orbital distance from the Sun about halfway between Mercury and Earth, Venus is the second-largest rocky planet in the
Solar System (Fig. 1B). Only a little smaller and less massive than Earth, and likely formed of the same materials, the surface
conditions of these two bodies are anything but similar. The atmospheric pressure on Venus is in excess of 90 bars, and the surface
temperature is a formidable 470  C. These conditions are thought to be the outcome of a runaway greenhouse effect the planet
experienced perhaps as (geologically) recently as 1 billion years ago. This timing reflects the average surface age of the planet of
about 700 million years, substantially younger than Mercury, Mars, or the Moon. Indeed, almost 80% of Venus is covered in basaltic
lava plains, some of which might be strikingly young, as circumstantial evidence for ongoing volcanism was recorded by ESA’s
Venus Express spacecraft in 2010. Compositional measurements of the Venus atmosphere in the 1970s suggested that Venus may
once have had much more water than its present hyper-arid atmosphere suggests; whether Venus might even once have been Earth-
like remains a major, unanswered question.
Earth itself is the largest rocky body in the Solar System (Fig. 1C). Unique among its planetary kin, Earth has a mosaic of mobile
plates that move across its surface, helping to recycle volatiles back into the interior and regulating planetary temperature. It is not
clear when, or why, plate tectonics (or major lateral mobility of the crust generally) began but, through dictating the arrangement of
continents, this process has played a major role in shaping the planet surface. Our planet is accompanied by one natural satellite, the
Moon, which consists of ancient, rugged highlands and expansive lava plains, the majority of which are situated on the tidally
locked side that faces Earth. The leading hypothesis for the formation of the Moon features an early, giant impact of proto-Earth by a
Mars-size object. The resulting collision formed a synestia, a giant torus of vaporized rock that ultimately cooled, first to form the
Moon and then Earth.
 Planetary Geology 3

Fig. 1 The rocky worlds of the inner Solar System. (A) Mercury in true color, as seen by NASA’s MESSENGER mission. Note the heavily cratered surface, best seen
in this view along the terminator (the line dividing day and night). (B) A radar mosaic of Venus, compiled with NASA Magellan data; the radar-bright network of
features along the equator is a rift system that subtends more than half of the planet’s circumference. (C) Earth, with the far side of the Moon also visible, taken by
NASA’s DSCOVR spacecraft. (D) A true-color composite image of Mars from NASA Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft data. Thin water-vapor clouds are associated
with many of the giant volcanic edifices in Mars’ western hemisphere, including the largest shield volcano in the Solar System, Olympus Mons (far left). The Valles
Marineris canyon system is at lower right. Image credits: (A) NASA/JHU APL/Carnegie Institution of Washington; (B) NASA/JPL-Caltech; (C) NASA/NOAA; (D) NASA/
JPL/Malin Space Science Systems. Images are not to scale.

The fourth planet of the inner Solar System is Mars (Fig. 1D). About the size of Earth’s outer liquid core, its lack of an intrinsically
generated magnetic field suggests that small Mars has lost the bulk of its atmosphere through geological time. Even so, this planet
features some of the most dramatic geology in the Solar System, including the Valles Marineris canyon system, which stretches a
distance equivalent to the width of the continental United States, and Olympus Mons, a volcano the size of France. There is evidence
for liquid water having once flowed across the Martian surface, possibly during brief periods when the atmospheric pressure was
much greater than today’s six millibars. A primary focus of Mars exploration at present is determining if the Red Planet may once
have been conducive for the formation of life.

The Giant planets and their moons

Beyond Mars is the so-called “frost line,” where volatiles such as water and CO2 occur as solids, and where H and He are in
abundance. It is in this region of the Solar System that the giant planets are situated (Fig. 2). The largest, Jupiter (Fig. 2A),
predominantly comprises H and He, and is more than 300 times the mass of Earth. Even majestic Saturn (Fig. 2B), a third the
mass of Jupiter, is a gigantic planet of diameter nine times that of Earth, with a ring system primarily composed of particle-to-
boulder-size water and dust particles. Farther out again are the “ice giants,” Uranus and Neptune (Fig. 2C and D) which, although
also mainly made of H and He, have additional gasses including CH4 and NH3 in their atmospheres—substances that are
considered by astronomers as “icy” at their orbital distances from the Sun.
4 Planetary Geology

Fig. 2 The giant planets in the Solar System. (A) Jupiter in enhanced color, from NASA Juno data; this view includes a belt of storms at mid-latitudes (orange), as
well as the storm systems closer to the pole (blue). (B) Saturn as seen by the NASA Cassini mission during an equinox. (C) Uranus, imaged by the Voyager 2
spacecraft in 1986. At visible wavelengths, the global cloud layer at Uranus is virtually featureless. (D) Crescent Neptune and its large icy moon, Triton, as seen by
Voyager 2 during the departure phase of its flyby in 1989. Some cloud structure in the Neptune atmosphere is visible at lower right. Image credits: (A) NASA/JPL-
Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Seán Doran; (B) NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute; (C) NASA/JPL-Caltech; (D) NASA/JPL-Caltech/Justin Cowart.
Images are not to scale.

These worlds have no surfaces to speak of, but their relevance to planetary geology rests with their satellites (Fig. 3). The largest
moon in the Solar System, orbiting Jupiter, is Ganymede, which is in fact larger than Mercury. Ganymede’s surface is mainly water
ice, solid at five times the distance to the Sun than Earth; this satellite features a mix of various ice phases and layers of ever more
saline water that together are over 900 km deep and sit atop a rocky interior that itself is larger than the Moon. Other notable
satellites of Jupiter include Io (Fig. 3A), among the most volcanically active bodies in the Solar System, and Europa (Fig. 3B),
another icy moon with a likely subsurface liquid water ocean that might even host the conditions required for life. But Jupiter is not
alone in hosting some remarkable planetary bodies: Saturn’s largest moon, Titan (Fig. 3C), is just a little smaller than Ganymede,
and is the only other world known where liquid is stable at the surface for extended periods of time. Some 10  farther from the Sun
than Earth, however, with a surface temperature of about −180  C, the liquid on Titan’s surface is not water but the hydrocarbons
methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6). Yet Titan has an active “methanological” cycle, with rainfall, evaporation, and even fluvial and
lacustrine landforms recognized across its surface.
Uranus, too, has a set of icy satellites, although little is known about them because only a single spacecraft has visited Uranus and
acquired close-up images of those moons. NASA’s Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, returning a wealth of data during the hours-
long interval of closest approach. Three years later, Voyager 2 encountered the most distant planet in the Solar System, Neptune, and
helped characterize that world’s cold atmosphere and gigantic satellite, Triton (Fig. 3D). This moon may be another ice-covered
body hiding a subsurface liquid water ocean, but just as tantalizing was evidence returned by Voyager 2 of active plumes of material
blasting from Triton’s surface and forming dark streaks across the adjoining icy plains. And perhaps most interestingly of all, Triton’s
retrograde orbit about Neptune suggests that the moon did not originally form there, but was captured eons ago when it came from
 Planetary Geology 5

Fig. 3 Four giant planet icy satellites. (A) Jupiter’s moon Io, one of the most volcanically active worlds in the Solar System, imaged by NASA’s Galileo mission.
Along the limb of Io (at left) is a volcanic plume; this plume rose to a height of 140 km and erupted from a caldera called Pillan Patera. (B) Jupiter’s satellite Europa,
also imaged by the Galileo spacecraft. This true-color image shows the pale icy shell, which is heavily fractured; organic compounds fill these fractures, giving them
their distinctive orange hue. (C) A mosaic of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, observed at near-IR wavelengths by the Cassini spacecraft. In this scene, the Sun glints off
the north polar seas of methane/ethane (upper left). (D) A true-color image mosaic of Triton, from data returned by Voyager 2. The dark streaks at center are the
deposits of the jets of material seen to emanate from Triton; the moon’s enigmatic “cantaloupe terrain,” which may reflect the diapiric rise of material less dense
than the crust, is visible at top. Image credits: (A) NASA/JPL-Caltech; (B) NASA/JPL-Caltech/DLR; (C) NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho;
(D) NASA/JPL-Caltech. Images are not to scale.

farther out in the Solar System and approached too close to Neptune to escape. It is now thought that Triton originated in the Kuiper
Belt, a disk-shaped region beyond about 50  Earth’s distance to the Sun in which Pluto is situated. As a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO)
Triton thus offers an insight into a portion of the Solar System largely inaccessible at present.

Dwarf planets and minor bodies

Were Triton not orbiting Neptune, it might well have been classified as a dwarf planet. This definition was developed in 2006 by the
International Astronomical Union (the IAU, the global entity responsible for naming objects in space) to account for the discovery
of an increasing number of bodies in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. In addition to requiring that a planet orbit the Sun, and be under
hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e., having rounded itself under the effect of gravity), a body was also deemed to have had “cleared its
neighborhood”—that is, be the gravitationally dominant object in its orbit. Because the biggest moon of Pluto, Charon, is so large
that both it and Pluto orbit a shared point in space physically outside Pluto itself, the IAU assessed Pluto as having failed to meet
that third criterion.
The list of recognized dwarf planets is short, but growing. In addition to Pluto and Ceres (the only dwarf planet in the main
asteroid belt), several other bodies of about the size of Pluto and much less massive than Mercury (the smallest planet) have been
identified, including Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. Collectively, these bodies, including Pluto but not Ceres, are now generally
termed Trans-Neptunian Objects or TNOs (a classification that by definition includes KBOs). It is very likely that there are many
6 Planetary Geology

thousands of objects about the size of Pluto in orbit of the Sun beyond Neptune, and countless millions more yet smaller objects.
Detecting even relatively large TNOs is difficult, however, and only a single spacecraft has been dispatched with the specific purpose
of visiting this region of space. In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto (Fig. 4), returning astonishing images of a
world showing much more complex geological history than had been expected for a body so small and distant from the Sun.
The term Minor Bodies collectively encompasses a huge range of irregularly shaped celestial objects, including asteroids and
comets (Fig. 5), throughout the Solar System. There are discrete groups of asteroids—rocky, often loosely aggregated bodies—at
various places in the Solar System, and which represent the leftover materials after planetary formation had ended (Fig. 5A).
Arguably the best-known asteroids comprise the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but other groups include those that
orbit the Sun at distances between Jupiter and Neptune, and in the region of space through which Earth passes. Comets are irregular
objects made up of a mix of ice and silicate dust; the degassing of those volatiles under increased solar radiation as they pass close to
the Sun is what gives comets their distinctive tails, one each of ice and dust (Fig. 5B). Some comets have orbits than bring them only
as far from the Sun as Jupiter, whereas others travel much farther out into the outskirts of the Solar System, likely originating in the
Kuiper Belt and beyond.

Migrating Planets?
Our understanding of the layout of the Solar System has largely been set for some time, but new details continue to emerge, for
instance with continued discoveries of new TNOs. But a key question has arisen in recent years—has the present arrangement of
worlds in the Solar System always been this way?
This question has been motivated by a related topic—the apparent Late Heavy Bombardment of the inner Solar System. When
samples from the Moon’s surface returned by the Apollo astronauts and by Soviet robotic missions were analyzed in laboratories on
Earth, radiometric age analyses returned the curious and consistent result that all of the major impact basins from which those
samples were taken appeared to be about the same age, having formed in a relatively narrow span between around 4.1 and 3.9
billion years ago. This finding led to a hypothesis termed the Late Heavy Bombardment, in which an influx of very large impactors
swept through the inner Solar System to create the staggeringly large basins on the Moon, as well as those on Mars and Mercury.
To explain such an influx, several hundred million years after the planets formed, various models of planetary migration were

Fig. 4 A composite, enhanced-color image of Pluto (lower right) and its largest moon Charon (upper left), from data taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.
Pluto has portions of its surface with substantially different ages, as evinced by differences in areal crater densities, including a vast expanse of nitrogen ice called
Sputnik Planitia (pale yellow, center of Pluto disk). Pluto also boasts long sets of graben, heavily cratered terrains, and rugged water-ice mountains (particularly
along the western margin of Sputnik Planitia). In contrast, much darker Charon displays an equator-spanning rift system, but a history of much less geological
activity than Pluto. Image credit: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI. Both worlds are approximately to scale.
 Planetary Geology 7

Fig. 5 Examples of minor bodies in the Solar System. (A) Asteroid Eros, which was visited by NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker mission. This color view is a composite of
six separate images draped over a computer model of the asteroid. Note the large but topographically subdued impact craters, and regions between the larger crater
that are relatively smooth; the crater at the top of the asteroid is 5.3 km in diameter. Eros also has a highly irregular shape. (B) Comet C/2002 V1 (NEAT), a comet
photographed here from the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The comet nucleus is in the center of the bright coma (lower right); tails of dust and ice
emanate from the nucleus and tend to the upper left in this image. Image credits: (A) NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHU APL; (B) NASA.

proposed that featured the giant planets entering and exiting gravitational resonances and moving first toward, and then away from,
the Sun. It is thought that this migration disrupted minor bodies throughout the Solar System and, therefore, sent asteroids and
comets in formerly stable orbits hurtling inward. The formation of large impact basins throughout the inner Solar System (and
several other aspects of the distributions of minor bodies) could thus be explained, with the corollary that planets were seemingly
able to change their orbital distances relative to the Sun, at least temporarily.
Nonetheless, when that clustering of lunar impact basin ages was first reported, the possibility was raised that the samples
returned from the Moon might be biased. Specifically, much of the material brought back to Earth, even if collected across the lunar
nearside, might have been ejecta from the impact that formed the gigantic Imbrium basin. If so, then the sample radiogenic ages did
not indicate a clustering of several impacts but rather one single impact, which affected almost an entire hemisphere of the Moon.
With no samples from Mars or Mercury yet in hand, it is not currently possible to independently assess the ages of large basins on
those other rocky worlds, and so test or refute the Late Heavy Bombardment hypothesis.
Curiously, the computer models developed to simulate planetary migration and the disruption of the orbits of minor bodies do
an even better job predicting the present distributions of various asteroid and comet populations without a requirement that such
disruption took place 4.1–3.9 billion years ago. Those simulations indicate that, although the giant planets likely did migrate to and
fro, they did so very early on, probably within the first few tens of millions of years as the Solar System was still forming. It may be,
then, that planetary migration is a common characteristic of planetary systems, at least early on, with the final position of planets
largely a stochastic process. One of the questions that the study of exoplanets may be able to answer is whether the arrangement of
planets in our Solar System is unique, or common, to planetary systems in general.

Earth as a Natural Laboratory

The use of remotely sensed data of various types, the ground truthing of inferences made from those data in appropriate field
settings, comprehensive geochemical laboratory analyses, and sophisticated computer and physical modeling together represent the
instruments of the planetary geologist’s toolkit. Perhaps the most notable difference between geology as an Earth-focused discipline
and as applied to planetary science is the widespread use of robotic spacecraft. But at its core, planetary geology is the study of the
materials, processes, and histories of solid-surface bodies, of which Earth is firmly one.

Planetary Geology Techniques

Remote sensing
First and foremost, remote sensing is the key to planetary geology. It was the images returned by robotic spacecraft in the 1960s and
1970s that helped kick-start the discipline, and it is images—and a breadth of other remotely sensed datasets such as topography,
radar, spectral, and geophysical measurements—on which geological interpretations are based, and hypotheses formulated and
8 Planetary Geology

tested. Early missions carried television cameras and systems to scan optical images into digital data for transmission back to Earth,
but modern spacecraft are equipped with digital camera systems and sophisticated optical systems. For example, NASA’s Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter has an instrument payload that includes a camera system able to resolve the Apollo landing sites and rover
tracks from orbit (Fig. 6), and the NASA Perseverance rover, launched in July 2020, can image the Martian surface with a 2-megapixel
camera.
Topographic data can be acquired with laser altimeters or from stereophotogrammetry, just as on Earth, and a wide variety of
imaging spectrometers, capable of measuring surfaces in situ or from orbit across a broad range of spectral frequencies, have been
flown as part of planetary geology missions. Indeed, ever more capable X-ray, neutron, and gamma-ray spectrometers have been
deployed across the Solar System, distant cousins to the handheld instruments available for geological investigations in the field.
Geophysical data including gravity anomalies are frequently obtained using radio science, where the Doppler effect is monitored on
transmissions to and from the spacecraft and, with information on surface topography, density, etc., used to infer the interior
properties of planetary bodies.
Substantial processing is required to turn digital data beamed back to Earth into geologically useful information. Much of this
processing involves georeferencing planetary data: that is, tying it to a coordinate system developed for a given planet, moon, or
minor body. Equators are defined as that great circle perpendicular to a body’s axis of rotation. Prime meridians, just as on Earth, are
arbitrarily set for most worlds, although moons that are tidally locked to their host planets are assigned lines of zero longitude at the
point on the surface where that planet is directly overhead. In the absence of a sea, as for Earth, a datum equivalent to “sea level” is
set per some other metric, such as the 6 millibar atmospheric pressure surface for Mars, or a mean radius of 6051 km from the center
of the planet for Venus. Once processed, most planetary datasets can be readily imported into geographical information system
software and analyzed, just as for Earth-based geological data.

Laboratory analyses
Although it is considerably easier to acquire image data of other planets than samples, we nonetheless have materials returned from
the Moon by astronauts and robots, as well as thousands of meteorites that themselves sample other planetary bodies such as the
Moon, Mars, and the asteroids that constitute the building blocks of the Solar System. And the laboratory techniques developed over
the past century to investigate geological samples on Earth are just as applicable, and effective, for assessing the compositional
characteristics of extraterrestrial materials.
For example, radiometric age dating, employing numerous systems such as U–Pb, Sm–Nd, and Lu–Hf is commonly used to
establish the formation ages of lunar and meteorite samples. Mass spectrometry, ion microprobe analysis, and scanning and
tunneling electron microscopy are all conventional laboratory techniques, among others, that find widespread use in planetary
geology applications. It was detailed compositional analyses that showed the samples returned from the Moon to have strong
similarities with rocks on Earth, leading to the formulation of the giant impact hypothesis. And continued technological develop-
ment has seen some of this instrumentation actually flown on spacecraft missions: NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover

Fig. 6 The Apollo 15 landing site imaged by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from an altitude of 25 km. Key features are labeled: the Descent Stage is the
part of the Lunar Lander that remained on the surface; the LRV is the Lunar Roving Vehicle, and the ALSEP is the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package. LRV
tracks are marked with black arrows. Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.
 Planetary Geology 9

carries a comprehensive suite of instruments, including an X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence analyzer, a gas chromatograph,
and tunable laser and quadrupole mass spectrometers, to characterize the composition of surface materials there.

Modeling
Equally building on the experience of Earth-focused geological and geophysical studies, analytical, numerical, and physical
modeling is widely employed in planetary geology. Analytical solutions to elastic deformation, for instance, can be readily applied
to extraterrestrial tectonic deformation in standard software coding packages. More sophisticated computer modeling software,
including several examples developed for the oil and gas industry, have found use in tackling planetary geophysical problems, as
have programs originally designed for aeronautical design and civil engineering.
As an established technique in Earth-focused geosciences, physical or “analog” modeling is increasingly finding a footing in
planetary applications. The use of materials such as clay, sand, silica gel, glass beads, etc., as scaled simulants for rocky and icy crusts,
surficial deposits, and even interiors offers an affordable and physically realistic approach to investigating planetary phenomena
and landforms. When coupled with computerized methods for resolving model topography, particle motion, and even 3-D and 4-D
cross-section analysis, analog modeling represents a potent tool for the planetary geologist, especially if partnered with numerical or
analytical modeling.

Fieldwork
As crucial as fieldwork is to the study of geology on Earth, it has for obvious reasons played a much more modest role in planetary
geology to date. The vast majority of what we know of planetary bodies comes primarily from remotely sensed observations. But
fieldwork is recognized as being vitally important, with considerable training of the Apollo astronauts in analog settings on Earth
having been a major part of their preparation for operations on the lunar surface (Fig. 7). Although only Apollo astronaut Schmitt
was already a professional geologist, all of those selected to walk on the Moon gained extensive experience in understanding how
rocks form and are modified, how to identify geological materials at the outcrop scale, and how to sample those materials for return
to Earth. Indeed, it was during Schmitt’s Apollo 17 mission that he and mission commander Cernan identified the famous “orange
soil” that upon analysis back on Earth was found to be fragments of glass erupted by pyroclastic activity, providing definitive proof
of the Moon being at least once volatile-rich enough to support explosive volcanism.
No humans, geologists or otherwise, have yet returned to the Moon or visited any other Solar System body, but robotic spacecraft
have continued in their stead. Since the late 1990s a series of rovers has visited Mars, and a new understanding of the Red Planet at
outcrop scale has been gained through their electronic eyes, an understanding simply not possible from orbital observations. Images
in particular taken by the Curiosity rover have transformed Mars into a world where joints, veins, thin laminar bedding, and even
individual clasts and mineral grains are accessible for study, revealing that the processes so characteristic of geology on Earth are
shared by at least one other rocky world in the Solar System and are, therefore, probably ubiquitous throughout the universe.

Geological Processes Across the Solar System

From six decades of robotic exploration of the Solar System, it is now recognized that several geological processes are fundamental
to all rocky planets and, in most cases, to their moons as well. Chief among those processes is impact cratering, and the only one that

Fig. 7 Fieldwork represented a substantial component of training for the Apollo missions to the Moon. In this image, Apollo 11 back-up Commander Jim Lovell
(left) films back-up Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise, who is inspecting a rock during field training in Sierra Blanca, west Texas. Image credit: NASA.
10 Planetary Geology

does not require a body to have internal energy to become manifest. For that reason, planets as large as Mars and minor bodies as
small as asteroids a few tens of meters across show evidence of impact cratering. But the formation of impact craters on Earth and
other worlds was not fully understood until the middle of the 20th century, when it was established that Meteor Crater (formally
Barringer Crater) in Arizona was formed by a bolide (an extraterrestrial object that collided with Earth), rather than from violent
volcanic outgassing. More recent advances, first with physical simulations of high-velocity impactors into analog materials, and later
with 2-D and 3-D computer modeling validated by recent drilling of the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, Mexico, have shown us just
how destructive the impact process can be. We now know, from in situ examination and retrieval to Earth of space hardware, that
impactors span a huge size range from micrometeorites to planetary embryos as big as Mars. Indeed, it has been proposed that
Mercury’s anomalously huge iron core may reflect an early impact that stripped off much of its silicate fraction. That Venus rotates
on its axis in the opposite direction to the other planets in the Solar System, that the northern third of Mars is topographically
depressed relative to the rest of the planet, and even that Uranus has an axial tilt of 98 degrees, may also be the consequences of
ancient, giant impacts early in Solar System history.
Repeated high-resolution imaging of the lunar and Martian surfaces over the past decade or so has given us a sense of the present
impactor influx on both worlds, and Earth’s own geological record tells us that impactors about 10 km in diameter have hit the
planet at intervals of least about 65 million years. But even a modest impactor can have severe consequences. For example, the
meteor that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 was only about 20 m across but traveled at 20 km/s, so produced a
shockwave that injured hundreds on the ground (mainly from the effects of flying glass from shattered nearby windows) when it
exploded at an altitude of around 30 km. The last sizeable impact to occur on Earth was likely also in Russia, a century before, when
an airburst flattened a vast forested region in Siberia in 1908.
Impact craters play an important role in assessing planetary surfaces, because they offer a means to establish relative (and, with
some statistical modeling and assumptions, absolute model) ages of those surfaces. Under the premise that the longer a given
geological unit (a lava flow, impact crater rim, etc.) on a planetary body has been exposed to impacts, the more heavily cratered it
will be acquiring statistical information on the number and sizes of craters on that unit can provide its relative age compared with
other units on that body (Fig. 8). When calibrated with radiometric ages from returned lunar samples, crater size–frequency
distributions on the Moon have been used to assign absolute model ages to lunar surface units. Further assumptions about impactor
fluxes at different distances to the Sun, the populations of prospective impactors throughout the Solar System, and even on material
properties of planetary surfaces have been combined to generate model production functions and impact chronologies for Mercury,
Mars, and numerous bodies in the outer Solar System for which we do not at present have samples.
Of all the solid-surface worlds yet surveyed, two other processes have proven to be omnipresent: tectonic deformation, and mass
wasting. Neither is surprising: tectonic deformation arises from a host of mechanisms that give rise to stresses, from interior activity
(e.g., mantle convection, global cooling, diking, etc.), to the impact process (which often produces craters delineated by huge,
inward-dipping normal faults), to thermal stresses from insolation and even from tidal torques between a moon and its parent
planet or between moons. The range of tectonic structures on Earth is replicated elsewhere in the Solar System, from joints and other
extensional fractures to normal faults, half-graben and graben (Fig. 9), thrust faults, and strike-slip faults—although the latter type
of fracture is comparatively rare and usually manifest as small ramps and tear faults in service of larger dip-slip structures. Similarly,
under the effect of even a very weak gravitational field, geological materials will slump, slide, fall, or otherwise work to equilibrate
with the surrounding terrain. As a result, some evidence for mass wasting is observed on all solid worlds, such as huge landslides

Fig. 8 An enhanced-color view of a portion of Mercury’s surface at high northern latitudes, taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft. The yellower material is relatively
younger basaltic plains lavas, which poured across the planet surface as vast, tabular flows to cover the older, more rugged crustal material (also probably originally
volcanic), which is colored blue here. Superposition relations and crater statistics support this interpretation of relative age; note the relatively smoother texture of the
volcanic plains compared with the bluer crustal materials. The field of view in this image is approximately 1500 km east to west; north is up. The black rectangles
are gores (gaps) in the image. Image credit: NASA/JHU APL/Carnegie Institution of Washington.
 Planetary Geology 11

Fig. 9 An example of tectonic deformation on Mars. Here, a set of graben and half-graben strikes from top left to bottom right (southwest–northeast, as north is to
the right) in Ascuris Planum, in the planet’s western hemisphere. These structures likely reflect diking associated with the nearby massive Tharsis volcanic province.
Note some evidence for volcanic infilling of pre-existing, low-lying terrain (top right), and older fractures trending left–right (south–north) and bottom left to top right
(southeast–northwest). This image is from the High-Resolution Stereo Camera onboard the ESA Mars Express spacecraft. The scale bar at lower right is 20 km long.
Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin.

within Mars’ gigantic Valles Marineris, terraced slumps within craters from rocky Mercury to icy Ganymede, talus slopes on comet
67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, and hillslope creep on the Moon.
As a primary means of releasing heat from the interior, silicate volcanism has marked the surfaces of all inner Solar System
worlds and Jupiter’s tidally heated moon Io. Basaltic lavas likely represent the bulk of the crusts of Mercury, Venus, and Mars.
Waning volcanism on Mercury became increasingly confined to impact basins and other sites of weakness as the planet started to
contract, but larger Venus and Mars saw widespread volcanic activity within the last few hundred million years, and, in Venus’ case,
possibly even through to today.
There is another form of volcanism postulated for icy bodies, termed cryovolcanism. This concept is similar to that for silicate
volcanism, in that a change of phase of material from solid to liquid in the interior leads to some of that liquid reaching the surface.
Unlike silicate volcanism, however, buoyancy alone is not sufficient for melted water (with various impurities such as ammonia,
etc.) to ascend through ice to the surface, and so some combination of degassing volatiles and regional stresses may enable cryolavas
to erupt. This latter process in particular likely drives the eruption of jets of water vapor into space from a set of large fractures at the
south pole of Enceladus, a tiny ice satellite of Saturn (Fig. 10). Interestingly, portions of icy moons including Saturn’s Dione and
Titan, Jupiter’s Ganymede, and Pluto’s huge satellite Charon show areas with relatively little cratering compared with their
surroundings, consistent with having been resurfaced by cryolavas.
Impact cratering, tectonism, mass wasting, and volcanism are major and widespread geological phenomena, and all can take
place on bodies both with and without an atmosphere. Considerably rarer, but nonetheless not confined only to Earth, is
hydrological activity. There is evidence for water once having flowed across Mars, in the form of small valley networks within
that planet’s ancient southern uplands, as well as several enormous channels near the equator, complete with teardrop-shaped
islands, that empty out to the northern lowlands. It remains a matter of debate as to whether such fluvial action took place through
an extended “warm and wet” period of Martian history, or only as transient events when atmospheric pressure temporarily increased
because of enhanced but short-lived volcanism.

Fig. 10 Cryovolcanism in the outer Solar System. In this image, acquired by the Cassini spacecraft, jets of water vapor emanate from several large fractures at the
south pole of the icy moon Enceladus. The exposure in this image has been set to resolve the tenuous jets, overexposing the sunlit portion of the moon’s surface.
Even so, the complex tectonic fabric of Enceladus’ crust is visible. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI.
12 Planetary Geology

Fig. 11 Hydrocarbons on Titan. In this false-color mosaic, build with data from the Cassini spacecraft’s radar instrument, smooth surfaces are dark and rough
surfaces are bright. The irregular dark patch in the center of the image is Ligeia Mare, a lake of primarily liquid methane in Titan’s northern hemisphere. The
coastline of this lake was seen by Cassini to vary slightly through time, suggesting changes in the lake level. Cassini’s radar was able to penetrate in places to the
lake bottom, indicating that depths vary from about 5 m to as much as 200 m in places. Note the river system to the bottom left that feeds into the lake, and many
smaller streams around the lake’s periphery. North is to the top right; the lake is approximately 500 km across. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell.

Aside from Earth, Titan is the only world in the Solar System where, presently, liquid is stable at its surface. The act of evaporation
of methane and ethane from the surface, followed by their condensation and returning to the surface via precipitation, has played a
major role in shaping Titan’s icy crust. Fluvial features—rivers, for all intents and purposes—scour the landscape, emptying in to
closed depressions—lakes—and forming deltas as they do so (Fig. 11). That these landforms bear such a strong morphological
similarity to those on Earth tells us that the shaping of geological units by fluid follows the same physics, regardless of the solvent
itself.

Comparative Planetology
One of the greatest advantages offered by planetary geology is the ability to compare landforms and processes between worlds.
Underpinning this concept of comparative planetology is the application of our geological understanding of Earth to interpretations
of what we see on other planets. For example, the recognition of nested depressions at the summits of gigantic mountains on Mars
that resembled coalesced caldera complexes, and of long, radial, sinuous features with digitate ends on the flanks that are
morphologically identical to low-viscosity basaltic lava flows, together provided strong evidence that these mountains are
enormous versions of the shield volcanoes common to Earth. This approach has allowed the recognition and interpretation of
tectonic structures on Mercury, eolian dunes on Venus, river networks on Titan, and many more such examples.
However, the process works both ways. Plate tectonics and an active hydrological cycle on Earth obscure geological features, and
so more than 96% of our planet’s history is no longer accessible at the surface (or destroyed entirely by subduction). Yet the early
days of Solar System history remain written in the surfaces of worlds whose major activity has long since ended, including the
Moon, Mars, and Mercury. Numerous icy satellites in the outer Solar System are similarly marked. And it is by comparing other
bodies with Earth that it has become clear, for example, that our planet must have been hugely scarred by giant impacts early in
its youth.
Moreover, comparative planetology permits comparisons to be made between extraterrestrial worlds. For example, much
research has focused on the geological similarities between Mercury and the Moon, two inner Solar System bodies without
atmospheres. The giant volcanoes on Mars serve as end-members for understanding how large edifices form on rocky planets in
general, including on Venus. And morphological comparisons of those most ubiquitous features, impact craters, between rocky and
icy bodies in the inner and outer Solar System gives us insight into the impact process generally, at a systems level rather than for a
single planet or moon. This systems-level approach is, arguably, the single greatest benefit of planetary geology—the ability to
understand a phenomenon generally, including in ways that it is not, cannot, be manifest on Earth. To truly understand geological
processes, then, it is critical to understand the full parameter space for those processes, and not only those relevant to our own
planet.
 Planetary Geology 13

Milestones in Planetary Geology

As a scientific discipline in the modern sense, planetary geology is a young field: the first human spacecraft of any kind was Sputnik 1,
launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, and much less technologically capable than even the interplanetary spacecraft that followed
a few years later. Yet planetary geology in some form has been with us forever, as meteorites valued or even venerated by peoples
across the planet throughout history. It was only in the late 1700s that an extraterrestrial origin for meteorites began to be seriously
considered, however, which ultimately set the stage for the discipline of meteoritics and the recognition that the materials arriving
on Earth from space are compositionally similar not only to the bulk composition of our planet but to the solar photosphere.
Meteoritics have thus enabled geologists to investigate the compositions, formational histories, and even fates of planetary bodies
without having to physically visit those worlds, or retrieve samples from them.
Perhaps the start of planetary geology as an intellectual pursuit might be attributed to the introduction of the telescope in the
17th century. The Moon had been surveyed by peoples for millennia, but the telescope afforded the first glimpse of features on the
surface beyond the capabilities of the human eye, and quickly it was realized that the lunar surface was not smooth but pockmarked
and mountainous. Continued observations led to more detailed physiographic maps, including the naming of landforms that, to
various extent, remain in use today (e.g., the lunar maria, Latin for “seas”—although it is unclear whether astronomers legitimately
considered the vast basaltic lunar plains to actually be bodies of water; by the mid-18th century it was widely understood that the
Moon lacked an atmosphere). Geological models for the formation of the craters and mountains so prevalent on the lunar nearside
had yet to be developed, but serious attention was given to cataloguing those features, recording their distributions, and at least in
some cases testing hypotheses for surface conditions there.
Major advances in interplanetary geology did not take place until the mid-20th century, when space exploration driven by the
Cold War grew to encompass the inner Solar System itself. The first attempt at a spacecraft visit to another planet (i.e., not including
the Moon) was the Soviet Union’s Venera 1 mission, which was dispatched to Venus in February 1961. Contact with the spacecraft
was lost en route, however, and so the first successful interplanetary flyby was by NASA’s Mariner 2 spacecraft, of Venus, in
December 1962. This mission established that the Venus surface was blisteringly hot, dispelling any earlier notions of a warm,
humid climate on the second planet and motivating research into the runaway greenhouse effect as a means to render a planet
inhospitable.
The firsts in planetary science followed quickly in the 1960s and 1970s. In July 1965, the NASA Mariner 4 spacecraft became the
first mission not only to fly past Mars, but to return to Earth images of the Red Planet. The first humans set foot on the surface of
another planetary body in July 1969 when the Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the basaltic plains in
Mare Tranquillitatis. Over the next 3 years, Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 astronauts retrieved 382 kg of lunar rocks, core samples, sand,
and dust—joined by approximately 150 g of lunar soil obtained and dispatched to Earth robotically by the Soviet Luna 16, 20, and
24 missions in the early 1970s. In that decade, the Mariner 10 and 11 probes carried out the first successful flybys of Jupiter (1973)
and Saturn (1979), photographing not only those giant planets but many of their moons and, in Saturn’s case, its ring system. And
in October 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 lander returned the first image from the surface of another planet as it photographed its landing
site in Beta Regio on Venus (Fig. 12A), which was followed by the first image from the Martian surface taken by NASA’s Viking 1
lander in July 1976 (Fig. 12B).
These and other achievements transformed the planets from distant lights seen through a telescope to geologically diverse and
complex worlds, with many of the same fundamental interior and surface processes as Earth, but each with its own distinctive

Fig. 12 Planetary firsts. (A) The first image ever taken on the surface of another planet, this is the view of the Soviet Venera 9 lander after it touched down on
Venus. This landing site was characterized by polygonal boulders atop a surface layer of sand-to-cobble size particles. The horizon is visible at top right, distorted by
the fish-eye view of the Venera lander’s imaging system. The crush ring of the lander is the arcuate, bright object at bottom center. (B) The first image from the
surface of Mars, taken by the NASA Viking 1 lander. The surface is sandy, with fist-size blocks. One of the landing pads is visible at lower right. Image credits:
(A) Soviet Academy of Sciences/Ted Stryk; (B) NASA/JPL-Caltech.
14 Planetary Geology

characteristics. Indeed, that transition continues today, with the discovery of ever more exoplanets—starting in 1995 with 51 Pegasi
b, the first confirmed exoplanet around a Sun-like star, and the finding in 2009 of the first exoplanet with a density comparable to
that of Earth, CoRoT-7b. The ongoing analysis of meteorite and lunar samples, and of materials recovered from asteroids by
missions currently in flight, will keep advancing our understanding of the fundamental geological properties of planetary bodies
throughout the cosmos.

Synthesis and Outlook

Trends Across the Solar System
There is no evidence for the widespread presence of silicic crustal material on any rocky body in the Solar System other than Earth
(although some high-standing regions on Venus have been proposed to be that planet’s equivalent to continents). The view that
enormous volumes of silicic rocks can form only in the presence of substantial amounts of water, as has been proposed for the
formation of continental material on Earth, is consistent with the observation that ours is the only rocky planet with plate tectonics
and oceans today.
But those notable characteristics aside, six decades of planetary exploration have established that there are some key geological
trends across the Solar System. For example, the surfaces of all inner Solar System bodies are characterized by basaltic lava flows;
there are notable variations in major and trace element abundances between the lavas of Mercury, Earth, and the Moon, for
example, but the bulk composition of this material is the same. Similarly, all show a history of tectonic deformation, even absent
plate tectonics, and all have been scoured by bolide impacts. The atmosphere of Mars was probably once much more substantial,
and that of Venus much less so, but they do both have atmospheres in addition to Earth. Mercury and the Moon are too small to
have been able to retain meaningful atmospheres over geological time, although they may also have had transient gaseous
envelopes early in their lives. Mercury and Earth have modern, intrinsically generated magnetic fields, and Mars and the Moon
hosted ancient dynamos. It is not yet known whether remnant magnetization will be detected in the Venus crust, but why Venus
does not have its own magnetic field today remains an important question.
The inner Solar System worlds even share some traits in terms of water. Water ice has been detected in permanently shadowed
regions of the poles of Mercury and the Moon. Mars had, for a time at least, water running across its surface. And there are dramatic
reservoirs of liquid water in the outer Solar System: there are many times the volume of water in Earth’s oceans under the icy shells of
numerous bodies, including Europa, Titan, and Ganymede. The detection of water in both comets and asteroids, and even in
interstellar minor bodies recently detected in the Solar System, together with the geological histories recorded in the atmospheres
and surfaces of planetary bodies, tells of a complex story of volatile delivery and depletion of rocky and icy worlds, from the earliest
days of planetary formation through to today. That Venus, a world so similar to Earth in size, mass, and bulk composition, may once
have been considerably water rich (although to an unknown extent), raises the possibility that the runaway greenhouse effect to
which the planet was subjected may 1 day also affect Earth. In the practice of comparative planetology, then, we can gain not only a
systems-level understanding of the solid-surface bodies in the Solar System, but perhaps even a glimpse at a possible fate of our
own world.

Next Steps and Future Directions

There is every indication that planetary geology will continue to grow as a discipline. Every few years, NASA selects one or more
planetary-focused missions for flight, and chooses larger-scale missions about twice a decade. Those missions have orbited Mercury,
flown past Pluto, landed on Mars, and will return samples from an asteroid. The European, Japanese, and Russian space agencies
have also been engaged in Solar System exploration, with several missions to the inner and outer Solar System in flight or under
development. Each year, more meteorite finds and falls are added to collections worldwide, and laboratory experiments on those
samples or analog materials give new insight into planetary materials, especially those under the temperature–pressure conditions
of giant planets. And with growing volumes of publicly accessible spacecraft data—all NASA mission data, for instance, are legally
mandated to be made freely available soon after acquisition—and new graduate and undergraduate planetary geoscience programs
coming on stream across the globe, the number of planet-fluent geoscientists is growing.
There is, of course, more work to be done. Once the exclusive domain of astronomers, planetary geoscience is increasingly
accessible to those with traditional geoscience backgrounds, but as a subject represents only a small fraction of the geosciences
overall—even though there are dozens of worlds with geological phenomena and landforms in the Solar System. Working to
introduce Earth-focused geologists to planetary topics, and extending the wealth of techniques and best practices developed for
traditional geology to planetary settings, will help narrow the divide between Earth and planetary scientists.
And such synergies will be crucial if we are to fully appreciate the diversity of and commonalities inherent to planetary bodies
generally. The training of the Apollo astronauts in relevant geological settings on Earth contributed to the remarkable success of
those missions. Continuing to calibrate our interpretations of planetary data with what we know of Earth will ensure that our
conclusions are as well grounded and geologically plausible as possible. Equally, by investigating other planetary bodies, we will be
much better able to understand how the conditions on those worlds influence fundamental geological processes everywhere than
were we solely to study Earth.
 Planetary Geology 15

Further Reading
Faure G and Mensing TM (2007) Introduction to Planetary Science: The Geological Perspective. New York, NY: Springer.
Greeley R (2013) Introduction to Planetary Geomorphology (1st edn) Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press.
McSween HY Jr., et al. (2019) Planetary Geoscience, 1st edn Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Melosh HJ (2011) Planetary Surface Processes, 1st edn Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Vita-Finzi C and Fortes D (2013) Planetary Geology: An Introduction, 2nd edn Edinburgh, UK: Dunedin Academic Press.

Relevant Website
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/. —NASA.