Convection in the interiors of planetesimals (asteroids), planets, and satellites is driving the thermal and chemical evolution of these bodies including the generation of possible magnetic fields. The wide size range induces a wide range of time scales from hundreds of thousands of years for small planetesimals to a few tens of Gigayears for massive super-Earths.
The NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, has safely landed near a 35 km long dark dune field in Gale Crater on Mars. This dune field crosses the landing site from the NE to the SW and lies along Curiosity’s traverse to Aeolis Mons. Dr.
Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034 is a new type of martian meteorite discovered in Morocco in 2011. NWA 7034 aka "Black Beauty", nicknamed for its dark shiny appearance, contains ten times more water than other martian meteorites.
When Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope toward Jupiter in 1609 and discovered what we now call the Galilean moons, he did not realized that he had just established a new research field in astronomy.
No instrumentation specifically designed to measure the topography of a planetary surface has ever been deployed to Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. Available mapping techniques that exist to perform such a task in the absence of the relevant instrumentation include stereo and photoclinometry (shape-from-shading) processing of available Voyager and Galil
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How does one search for a needle in a multi-dimensional haystack not knowing what a needle is and not being sure there is one in the haystack? Solving this sort of problem might seem to be impossible, yet this is exactly what Dynamic Quantum Clustering (DQC) manages to do.
