Planetary Geology

Catalog description

Over the past decades, spacecraft exploration and related laboratory research on extraterrestrial materials have given us a new understanding of planets and how they are shaped by geological processes. This course will focus on geologic processes, adopting a comparative approach that demonstrates the similarities and differences between planets, and the reasons for these. This course will integrate data from past and present space exploration missions to compare processes operating on the surface of the Earth to processes operating on the surface of other celestial objects. Aspects of mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, volcanology, sedimentology, geomorphology, tectonics, geophysics, and remote sensing will be used to examine this data and apply it to the geology of rocky bodies in the solar system as well as known exoplanets. (Prerequisite: SPST650)