Ithaca College

Dr. Beth Ellen Clark Joseph of the Department of Physics at Ithaca College was recently invited to review several articles for Nature and write a News & Views article for publication in the November 2012 issue. 

The article reviews results from NASA’s Dawn mission to asteroid 4 Vesta that suggest that some of the ageing effects on asteroid surfaces may be caused by an interplanetary rain of carbon-rich Solar System debris. These findings have implications for all remote-sensing studies of asteroid surfaces, and corroborate stratospheric studies that have found carbon-rich material in Earth’s upper atmosphere, presumably from the same rain of rich Solar System debris.