This book addresses and reviews many of the still little understood questions related to the processes underlying planetary magnetic fields and their interaction with the solar wind. With focus on research carried out within the German Priority Program "PlanetMag", it also provides an overview of the most recent research in the field. Magnetic fields play an important role in making a planet habitable by protecting the environment from the solar wind. Without the geomagnetic field, for example, life on Earth as we know it would not be possible. And results from recent space missions to Mars and Venus strongly indicate that planetary magnetic fields play a vital role in preventing atmospheric erosion by the solar wind. However, very little is known about the underlying interaction between the solar wind and a planet's magnetic field. The book takes a synergistic interdisciplinary approach that combines newly developed tools for data acquisition and analysis, computer simulations of planetary interiors and dynamos, models of solar wind interaction, measurement of ancient terrestrial rocks and meteorites, and laboratory investigations.

Wavelets analysis--a new and rapidly growing field of research--has been applied to a wide range of endeavors, from signal data analysis (geoprospection, speech recognition, and singularity detection) to data compression (image and voice-signals) to pure mathematics. Written in an accessible, user-friendly style, Wavelets: An Analysis Tool offers a self-contained, example-packed introduction to the subject. Taking into account the continuous transform as well as its discretized version (the ortho-normal basis) the book begins by introducing the continuous wavelets transform in one dimension. It goes on to provide detailed discussions of wavelet analysis of regular functions, tempered distributions, square integrable functions, and the continuous wavelet transform. Throughout, the language of group theory is used to unify various approaches. Profusely illustrated and containing information not available elsewhere, this book is ideal for advanced students and researchers in mathematics, physics, and signal processing engineering.

This book addresses and reviews many of the still little understood questions related to the processes underlying planetary magnetic fields and their interaction with the solar wind. With focus on research carried out within the German Priority Program "PlanetMag", it also provides an overview of the most recent research in the field. Magnetic fields play an important role in making a planet habitable by protecting the environment from the solar wind. Without the geomagnetic field, for example, life on Earth as we know it would not be possible. And results from recent space missions to Mars and Venus strongly indicate that planetary magnetic fields play a vital role in preventing atmospheric erosion by the solar wind. However, very little is known about the underlying interaction between the solar wind and a planet's magnetic field. The book takes a synergistic interdisciplinary approach that combines newly developed tools for data acquisition and analysis, computer simulations of planetary interiors and dynamos, models of solar wind interaction, measurement of ancient terrestrial rocks and meteorites, and laboratory investigations.