We have organized ten National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)–sponsored planetary volcanology field workshops on Hawai‘i since 1992, providing an opportunity for almost 140 NASA-funded graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty to view basaltic volcano features up close in the company of both terrestrial and planetary volcanologists. Most of the workshops have been thematic, for example, concentrating on large structural features (rift zones and calderas) or lava flows, or features best viewed in high-spatial-resolution data, but they always include a broad set of topics. The workshops purposely involve long field days—an appreciation of scale is important for planetary scientists, particularly if they are or will be working with slow-moving rovers.

Our goals are to give these young scientists a strong background in basaltic volcanology and provide the chance to view eruptive and volcano-structural features up close so that they can compare the appearance of these features in the field to their representations in state-of-the-art remote-sensing images, and relate them in turn to analogous planetary features. In addition, the workshop enables the participants to start a collection of field photographs and observations that they can use in future research and teaching. An added benefit is that the participants interact with each other, forging collaborations that we hope will persist throughout their careers.