NASA’s Dawn spacecraft unlocks secrets of giant asteroid
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The mineral distribution in the southern hemisphere of the giant asteroid Vesta with areas in purple having a higher proportion of diogenite minerals, and yellow areas having a higher proportion of eucrite minerals (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/INAF/MPS/DLR/IDA)
Three slices of a class of meteorites that fell to Earth that NASA’s Dawn mission has confirmed as originating from the giant asteroid Vesta (Photo: University of Tennessee)
Size comparison of Vesta against other similar bodies in the solar system: Mars, Mercury, Earth's moon and the dwarf planet Ceres (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)
Artist's concept of the internal structure of Vesta, based on data from NASA's Dawn mission, with the innermost core in brown, the mantle in green and the crust in gray (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Map showing the distribution of pyroxene, an iron- and magnesium-rich mineral, in the southern hemisphere of Vesta (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/INAF)
Global distribution of craters that hit Vesta, with yellow circles indicating craters of 2 miles (4 km) or wider, with the size of the circles indicating the size of the crater (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MPS/DLR/IDA/LSI)
Perspective views of the Rheasilvia impact basin on Vesta (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI)
Artist's concept of NASA's Dawn spacecraft orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta based on images obtained by Dawn's framing cameras (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Image showing the south pole of the giant asteroid Vesta obtained by the framing camera on NASA's Dawn spacecraft (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
Article Summary
After becoming the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in July 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has spent the last 10 months orbiting said object - the giant asteroid Vesta. During that period it has captured more than 20,000 images of Vesta and a multitude of data from different wavelengths of radiation. What it reveals is an asteroid that in many ways shares more in common with a small planet or Earth’s moon than it does with another asteroid.
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