ASTRONOMY 121
Solar System Geology

Required Texbook: None

Course Content and Philosophy:

The study of the Solar System is primarily an exercise in planetary geology. The input data, in most cases, consists only of images of planetary surfaces from which we attempt to reconstruct its particular geological history. Each planetary surface in our Solar System has a unique geological history and a wealth of network accessible information now exists. Well over 10,000 individual images of planetary surfaces are now available via the World Wide Web/Internet system. References to these image repositories are given under the Internet Resources heading of the main class page. These resources should be used often during this class.

The main goals of this class are to:

• To gain an understanding of some of the detailed properties of the various objects that make up our solar system.
• To achieve a coherent understanding of how the solar system was able to form in the Galaxy and the probability that similar formation processes occurred elsewhere.

Course Organization

This course is organized into 3 basic themes:

• I. A grand overview of the Solar System and the history of arriving at successively precise descriptions of it.
• II. The details of the individual surfaces of various planets and moons in the inner solar system.
• III. The details of the individual surfaces of various planets and moons in the outer solar system.

All lectures in this course will be delivered electronically. The lecture pages will be done in Netscape format so that they are accessible from any Internet connection.

Homework assignments will make use of the Internet in searching for relevant information.