Recent spacecraft missions are providing exciting new insights into surface processes and landscape evolution on other terrestrial planets. New imagery coupled with detailed topographic data and ground truth results from rovers are giving us high-resolution information about landforms, sedimentary deposits, and surface processes. Together these new datasets provide new insights into significant questions about planetary geomorphology.

Enormous research potential exists at the interface of geomorphology and planetary sciences, and in particular at the comparison between surface systems on earth with those on other planetary bodies. This is because landscapes on other planets represent geomorphic experiments conducted under different environmental conditions.

Some of the most spectacular landscapes in the Solar System are found on Mars. Evidence from high-resolution imagery from the HRSC instrument suggests episodes of catastrophic flooding resulting from abrupt groundwater release.

These results give rise to some fundamental questions about the Solar System and indeed our own planet. For example: What do we know about the nature of the early atmosphere on Mars, on the basis of surface mineralogy (OMEGA) and morphology (HRSC)? When and how active were fluvial processes on Mars? Where did the water come from? Were these early conditions favourable for life and what forms of life can we expect to find there?

Some of these questions will be discussed by the following panel members:

Gerhard Neukum, PI of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) project, Mars Express, the team responsible for the spectacular images from the Red Planet.
gneukum@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Jean-Pierre Bibring, PI of the OMEGA Visible and Infrared Mineralogical Mapping Spectrometer, Mars Express, the instrument that maps the surface composition of Mars.
jean-pierre.bibring@ias.u-psud.fr
Frances Westall, Palaeobiologist, Centre de Biologie Boléculaire d'Orléans
westall@cnrs-orleans.fr
Research: Earliest life on Earth and its geological context; Search for life on Mars and human exploration of Mars.
Sanjeev Gupta, geomorphologist, Imperial College, London. Research: Palaeomorphology, sedimentary processes, Controls on drainage evolution in tectonically active settings. s.gupta@imperial.ac.uk

Session: GM7 Comparing and contrasting planetary landscapes and surface processes | >>programme