Snow Line Impact Mechanics is a project that George Hatcher has been working on in the lab. The snow line is the distance from the Sun where water vapor condenses into solid ice. Farther from the Sun than the snow line(currently between Mars and Jupiter) solid ice is abundant and may help in the accretion of smaller objects into the larger building blocks of planets. In SLIM we are studying the cohesion of aggregates during low velocity collisions depending on whether or not – and how much – water ice is mixed into the dust aggregate. This should help us understand the role played by water ice in the early stages of planet formation.
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