Comparative Planetology

Texas A&M researchers found that Mars has undergone wet and dry periods and salt lakes formed similar to some found in South America.

If you could travel back in time 3.5 billion years, what would Mars look like? The picture is evolving among scientists working with NASA's Curiosity rover.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, which was the first mission to involve a spacecraft following a comet on its journey around the Sun, and placing a lander on its surface, has found clues about how magnetic fields may have helped the Solar System to

Venus may have been a temperate planet hosting liquid water for 2-3 billion years, until a dramatic transformation starting over 700 million years ago resurfaced around 80% of the planet.

Two NASA space telescopes have teamed up to identify, for the first time, the detailed chemical "fingerprint" of a planet between the sizes of Earth and Neptune.

Has Saturn’s icy moon – Titan – ever been home to life? SMU researchers hope to help discover whether this was true long before NASA completes an exploratory visit to its surface by a drone helicopter.

How light reflected by vegetation, varying through time, is a strong biosignature.

A purple-pigmented molecule could have been the first to turn sunlight into metabolic energy.

By looking at Earth’s full natural history and evolution, astronomers may have found a template for vegetation fingerprints – borrowing from epochs of changing flora – to determine the age of habitable exoplanets. “Our models show that Earth’s vegetation reflectance signature increases with coverage of