Saturday, February 04, 2006

Comet Tempel has Water

Comet Temple 1 was impacted back in July 2005 by Deep Impact. Data taken from the probe has three pockets of water along with lots of dust.
Tempel 1 has a surface area of roughly 45 square miles, or 1.2 billion square feet. The area taken up by the water ice, however, is only 300,000 square feet. The rest of the comet surface is dust.

"It's like a seven-acre skating rink of snowy dirt," said study co-author Peter Schultz of Brown University.

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