NASA officials are showing off a video (below) that pieces together photos taken by the Dawn spacecraft and takes viewers on a flyover of the asteroid Vesta.
The video was produced by the DLR Institute for Planetary Research in Berlin, and shows Vesta, the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt, in photographs taken from about 1,700 miles above its surface.
The asteroid is 575 kilometers in diameter and has a shape that bulges at its equator. One distinct feature that the Dawn spacecraft has photographed is a massive circular structure in the asteroid's south pole. It was discovered years ago by the Hubble Space Telescope, but scientists have not yet been able to get any close-up shots. With Dawn, researchers can now see that it is several hundred miles wide, with cliffs that are also several miles high. One mountain rises 9 miles above the base of the structure, "making it one of the highest elevations on all known bodies with solid surfaces in the solar system," NASA said.
"Flying over this feature, we see larger cliffs, deep grooves, and many types of lineaments on the surface," Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator, said in the video. "In the northern region of Vesta, there's a large feature we term the 'snowman,' a series of young craters."
A profile view of Vesta also shows "many small craters, grooves, and troughs, and bulges," which provide some insight into Vesta's history, Raymond said, like "its collisions with other objects and how the material on its surface has responded."
Since Vesta, like Earth, has seasons, the asteroid is dark in the high northern latitudes. It is now wintertime on the northern side and dark at all times.
Researchers have used the data to calculate Vesta's rotational axis and a system of latitude and longitude coordinates. The zero-longitude was determined by using a tiny crater, named Claudia.
Raymond said she and other researchers look forward to even sharper images that Dawn is expected to take next month as it descends into lower orbit.
Dawn successfully entered Vesta's orbit on July 16, and sent back the first images several days later. Dawn will study Vesta for one year, gathering observations that NASA said will help scientists understand the earliest chapter of our solar system's history. Dawn will then depart for the dwarf planet Ceres in July 2012.
This milestone has been several years in the making; Dawn departed Earth in 2007 and when it completes its journey, it will become the first spacecraft to orbit two solar system destinations beyond Earth, NASA said.
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