With the advent of actual planetary exploration in the 1960s, the planets, once merely points of light glimpsed vaguely through telescopes, became real worlds to be reconnoitered and studied with powerful new tools and techniques, including many borrowed from the study of our own home planet, the Earth. Planets have rocks and ice, landforms, weather, clouds, and climate. So the effort to figure out the planets drew in geologists, meteorologists, magnetospheric experts, chemists, and even biologists. Given its complexities, it especially attracted adventurous scientific types who were up for
...more
Birth of plan scirnce
