Giant Asteroid Vespa as Cold as Ice

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:03:54 -0500
science-and-technology

Is there water on Vespa? Timothy Stubbs and his colleague, Yongli Wang think so. In a NASA special Web feature Stubbs talks about their findings.

“”Near the north and south poles, the conditions appear to be favorable for water ice to exist beneath the surface,” says Timothy Stubbs of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Stubbs and Yongli Wang of the Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute at the University of Maryland published the models in the January 2012 issue of the journal Icarus. The models are based on information from telescopes including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.”