New NASA Dawn Visuals Show Vesta’s ‘Color Palette’

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Feature: 2011-375 Dec. 5, 2011

New NASA Dawn Visuals Show Vesta's 'Color Palette'

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-375&cid=release_2011-375

Vesta appears in a splendid rainbow-colored palette in new images obtained by NASA's
Dawn spacecraft. The colors, assigned by scientists to show different rock or mineral
types, reveal Vesta to be a world of many varied, well-separated layers and ingredients.
Vesta is unique among asteroids visited by spacecraft to date in having such wide
variation, supporting the notion that it is transitional between the terrestrial planets -- like
Earth, Mercury, Mars and Venus -- and its asteroid siblings.

In images from Dawn's framing camera, the colors reveal differences in the rock
composition associated with material ejected by impacts and geologic processes, such
as slumping, that have modified the asteroid's surface. Images from the visible and
infrared mapping spectrometer reveal that the surface materials contain the iron-bearing
mineral pyroxene and are a mixture of rapidly cooled surface rocks and a deeper layer
that cooled more slowly. The relative amounts of the different materials mimic the
topographic variations derived from stereo camera images, indicating a layered
structure that has been excavated by impacts. The rugged surface of Vesta is prone to
slumping of debris on steep slopes.

Dawn scientists presented the new images at the American Geophysical Union meeting
in San Francisco on Monday, Dec. 5. The panelists included Vishnu Reddy, framing
camera team associate, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-
Lindau, Germany; Eleonora Ammannito, visible and infrared spectrometer team
associate, Italian Space Agency, Rome; and David Williams, Dawn participating
scientist, Arizona State University, Tucson.

"Vesta's iron core makes it special and more like terrestrial planets than a garden-
variety asteroid," said Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The distinct compositional variation and
layering that we see at Vesta appear to derive from internal melting of the body shortly
after formation, which separated Vesta into crust, mantle and core."

The presentation also included a new movie, created by David O'Brien of the Planetary
Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz., that takes viewers on a spin around a hill on Vesta that
appears to be made of a distinctly darker material than the rest of the crust.

Dawn launched in September 2007 and arrived at Vesta on July 15, 2011. Following a
year at Vesta, the spacecraft will depart in July 2012 for the dwarf planet Ceres, where it
will arrive in 2015.

Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall
Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., designed and built the
spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System
Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are
international partners on the mission team.

More information about the Dawn mission is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

To follow the mission on Twitter, visit: http://www.twitter.com/NASA_Dawn .

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