Abstract
Most minor bodies in the Solar System orbit the Sun in the asteroid Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Kuiper Belt just beyond the orbit of Neptune or scatter around semi-stable Lagrange points of major planets as Trojans. A relatively small number follow more or less elongated elliptical and short lived planet-crossing orbits or have been even captured as irregular satellites into a planetocentric orbit about one of the major planets. Possibly a huge number of minor bodies hypothetically circles the Sun in a distance of up to one lightyear in a sphere-like region called the Oort cloud. Depending on their origin and evolution the minor bodies constitute of silicatic, metallic, organic and volatile materials of which water ice is the most dominant. This chapter is focused on the geologic evolution of minor bodies of substantially different composition and locations in the Solar System. Like the surfaces of the terrestrial planets (see Chap. 10), their surfaces are shaped by three major geologic processes: (1) impact cratering (see Chap. 6), (2) exogenic processes (see Chap. 7), including, e.g., space weathering, erosion and degradation, and (3) endogenic processes (see Chap. 8), including tectonism and (cryo)volcanism.
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Schmedemann, N., Massironi, M., Wagner, R., Stephan, K. (2018). Small Bodies and Dwarf Planets. In: Rossi, A., van Gasselt, S. (eds) Planetary Geology. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65179-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65179-8_13
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