[meteorite-list] Picture This: Vesta's Dark Materials in Dawn's View

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2013 09:41:53 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201301041741.r04HfrHb026078_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-001

Picture This: Vesta's Dark Materials in Dawn's View
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 03, 2013

A new study of images from NASA's Dawn mission examines remarkable,
dark-as-coal material that speckles the surface of the giant asteroid
Vesta. Scientists are using the images, taken by Dawn's framing camera,
to understand the impact environment early in Vesta's evolution.

In the most comprehensive analysis of the dark material to date, Dawn
scientists describe how this carbon-rich material tends to appear around
the edges of two giant impact basins in Vesta's southern hemisphere. The
analysis suggests that the dark material was most likely delivered by
the object that created the older of the two basins, known as Veneneia,
about 2 to 3 billion years ago. Some of those materials were later
covered up by the impact that created the younger basin, Rheasilvia.

The paper, published in the November-December issue of the journal
Icarus, was led by Vishnu Reddy of the Max Planck Institute for Solar
System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, and the University of North
Dakota, Grand Forks. More information on the paper is available at:
http://www.mpg.de/en .

The Dawn spacecraft orbited Vesta for more than a year, departing in
September 2012. Dawn is now on its way to the dwarf planet Ceres, and
will arrive in early 2015.

More information on Dawn is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The
University of California, Los Angeles, is responsible for overall Dawn
mission science. The Dawn framing cameras were developed and built under
the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research,
Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German
Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in
coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network
Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by the
Max Planck Society, DLR and NASA.

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook at jpl.nasa.gov

2013-001
Received on Fri 04 Jan 2013 12:41:53 PM PST