[meteorite-list] New View of Vesta Mountain From NASA's Dawn Mission

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:03:38 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201110111603.p9BG3cmG017294_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-317

New View of Vesta Mountain From NASA's Dawn Mission
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
October 10, 2011

A new image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows a mountain three times as
high as Mt. Everest, amidst the topography in the south polar region of
the giant asteroid Vesta.

The peak of Vesta's south pole mountain, seen in the center of the
image, rises about 13 miles (22 kilometers) above the average height of
the surrounding terrain. Another impressive structure is a large scarp,
a cliff with a steep slope, on the right side of this image. The scarp
bounds part of the south polar depression, and the Dawn team's
scientists believe features around its base are probably the result of
landslides.

The image is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/pia14869.html . It was
created from a shape model of Vesta, and shows an oblique perspective
view of the topography of the south polar region. The image resolution
is about 300 meters per pixel, and the vertical scale is 1.5 times that
of the horizontal scale.

Dawn entered orbit around Vesta in July. Members of the mission team
will discuss what the spacecraft has seen so far during a news
conference at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in
Minneapolis. Among other things, they'll share their hypotheses on the
origins of Vesta's curious craters.

The meeting, at the Minneapolis Convention Center, runs from Oct. 9 to
12, with the Dawn news conference scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 12, at
10 a.m. PDT (noon CDT).

The event will air live on the Geological Society of America webcast
page at:
http://hosted.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=e8adbee5a37e455fbe199b29129e3b7c1d .
 
Media representatives not able to attend the meeting may participate
by registering at: http://rock.geosociety.org/forms/11_pressConf.asp .
More information about the webcast is at:
http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/11-63.html .

The event will also be carried live, with a moderated chat, at:
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .

The news conference panelists are:

Carol Raymond, Dawn deputy principal investigator, NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Paul Schenk, Dawn participating scientist, Lunar and Planetary
Institute, Houston
Debra Buczkowski, Dawn participating scientist, Applied Physics
Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Md.
Federico Tosi, Dawn Visible and Infrared Spectrometer team member,
Italian Space Agency, Rome

Following a year at Vesta, the spacecraft will depart in July 2012 for
Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015. Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres
is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., 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 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 .

Priscilla Vega 818-354-1357
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Priscilla.R.Vega at jpl.nasa.gov

2011-317
Received on Tue 11 Oct 2011 12:03:38 PM PDT