Science Opportunities - Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science - page 74

research frontier documenting and understanding chemical processes that
produced the solar system and that modify both the surfaces and the
interiors of solar-system bodies. Such work was largely impossible from
the earlier generation of orbiting spacecraft. The results will be important
in a wide array of Earth and planetary science disciplines. Some key
research areas benefiting from these observations include the composition
and early evolution of the solar system, the climatic history of Mars, and
the possible existence of life beyond the Earth.
In addition, data collected from ongoing missions (e.g., the surprising
diversity of Jovian satellite magnetic fields detected by the Galileo mission) will
be analyzed over the next several years. A lengthy period of analysis of satellite
data, combined with other geophysical observations, is important for
understanding the chemical and physical structure and dynamics of planets.
Science Opportunities
Continuing exploration of the solar system, particularly Mars, will provide
both new opportunities and challenges for the Earth science and planetary science
communities in the coming decade ( Box 2.3 ). On the one hand, new high-
resolution observations of key physical, geological, chemical, and mineralogical
characteristics will permit insights to the processes occurring on and in other
solar system bodies. As the quantity and quality of observations approach those
for the Earth, the knowledge-base within the Earth science community will
become increasingly important for interpretation and comparison. On the other
hand, these observations will also contribute to an improvement in our
understanding of Earth and the solar system as a whole:
• Geological and geophysical processes occurring on other planets are
responses to the same basic forces as on Earth, but applied in different
ways to materials with different properties and subject to different
boundary conditions. As such, these systems will provide new
environments for investigating basic planetary phenomena.
• Unlike the Earth, which is continually resurfaced and eroded, many bodies
preserve a physical and chemical record from the earliest days of the solar
system. Thus, they provide data regarding planetary evolution that no
longer exists on Earth. For many fundamental processes that occur early
in a planet's history (e.g., formation of the first crust), the Earth's record
is extremely difficult to decipher.
• Distinctive chemical and isotopic composition is a first-order property of
the solar system, and the new data likely to be obtained over the next