About the Book

Liquid water is essential for the emergence of life at least as we know it on Earth. Written by recognized experts in the field, this volume provides a complete inventory of water throughout the Solar System and a comprehensive overview of the evolution of water from the interstellar medium to the final planetesimals and planets.

Through a series of up-to-date review papers, the book describes how water influences the geophysical evolutions of bodies and how it is in turn affected by such evolutions. Processes like atmospheric escape under the effect of stellar irradiation and collisional impacts are discussed in detail, with specific emphasis on the consequences for the budgets of water and volatile elements in general. Specific papers on the emergence of life on Earth and the prospects of habitability on extrasolar planets are included.

The papers take an interdisciplinary approach to habitability, addressing it from the perspectives of astronomy, planetary science, geochemistry, geophysics and biology. Comprehensive yet easy to read, this volume serves as an invaluable resource to scholarly, professional and general audiences alike.
​Originally published in Space Science Reviews in the Topical Collection "The Delivery of Water to Protoplanets, Planets and Satellites"
About the Author: Alessandro Morbidelli is director of research at CNRS, working in Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in Nice, France. He is an expert of dynamical aspects of formation and evolution of planetary systems. He is one of the editors of the journal Icarus, devoted to planetary science. He has published more than 200 research papers and one book. Recipient of several international awards, he is now associate member of the Academy of Sciences in France and Belgium.
Michel Blanc is an astronomer at IRAP, Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse. He works on the physics of planetary magnetospheres and on the exploration of giant planets systems. He is an Interdisciplinary Scientist on the Cassini mission to Saturn and Titan and a co-I of the Juno mission to Jupiter. He was also the main proponent to ESA of the Laplace mission concept, which is currently implemented as JUICE. He is the author of about 150 research papers and has edited several ISSI books. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, of the Air and Space Academy and of the International Academy of Astronautics. He was granted the first Cassini medal of the European Geosciences Union.
Yann Alibert is researcher at the CNRS, on leave since 2010, and presently working at the University of Bern. He is an expert in the formation and evolution of planetary systems. He received one of the first ERC starting grants in planetary sciences and is the author of numerous papers. He is now project leader and science officer in the NCCR PlanetS.

Linda Elkins-Tanton is the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, Director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and of the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking. Her research concerns terrestrial planetary formation and evolution, and she promotes and practices inquiry and exploration learning. Her mission is to create a generation of problem-solvers. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and of the American Mineralogical Society. In 2018 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Paul Estrada is a senior research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, and is the Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Chair for the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. His main areas of expertise are in the study of primary accretion in the early stages of protoplanetary disks, formation of satellites around gas giant planets, their accretion and interior evolution, and the dynamics, structural and compositional evolution of planetary rings.

Keiko Hamano is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow, working at Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo, Japan. She is an expert on planetary atmosphere-interior interaction based on theoretical modelling. She holds a PhD degree in Earth and Planetary Science from The University of Tokyo.
Helmut Lammer works at the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz. His main scientific expertise is related to comparative planetology and the evolution of planetary atmospheres and their water inventories. Dr. Lammer was/is involved in several space missions like Mars Express, Venus Express, BepiColombo and in COROT, CHEOPS and PLATO in the field of exoplanets. He was in ESAs Terrestrial Exoplanet Science Advisory Team responsible for habitability studies, and a member of ESAs Solar System Working Group and has more than 250 papers published in scientific peer reviewed journals.

Sean Raymond is a researcher at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France. He studies the formation and orbital dynamics of planetary systems, with applications to both the origin of the Solar System and the discovery, dynamics and formation of exoplanet systems. He has written more than 120 scientific articles and 70 articles for broad audiences, notably on his blog planetplanet.net.

Maria Schönbächler is a professor in Isotope Geochemistry at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. She is particularly interested in the formation and early evolution of terrestrial planets. Her research is orientated towards meteorite analyses including chronology, stable isotope fractionation and the development of new techniques for high-precision isotope analyses of geological materials. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, is executive board member of the Swiss Academy of Science and served in the board of the Meteoritical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry.