Small bodies such as asteroids and comets are of special interest to planetary scientists because of the clues they provide to the formation of the solar system as a whole. Zhang's paper details a new approach to modeling the thermophysical processes that lead to the evolution of volatiles–or readily vaporizable chemical elements and compounds–in such bodies.
The paper’s co-author, Christine Hartzell, is associate professor aerospace engineering at UMD and director of the Planetary Surfaces and Spacecraft Lab.
