What is astrogeology and what are the career possibilities?
Astrogeology is the branch of astronomy that deals with the physical properties of the surfaces of the planets in our solar system. This includes the analysis of photographs taken by various ‘flyby’ and ‘orbital’ missions to the planets, identifying and classifying surface features and putting them together into an integrated history of the planet. Lately, the analysis of meteoritic material from the antarctic has shown that some of the material probably came from the Moon and Mars, so we seem to have samples of these bodies to analyze right here on Earth. As for career opportunities, the locus of the work is at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California. Although analysis of data from past missions, and from the Hubble Space Telescope, is on going, the life blood of this research is in new NASA programs such as this month’s Galileo probe of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and the 1997 launch of the Cassini, Saturn/Titan probe. Planetary astronomy is going through hard times because it
