The Dawn spacecraft is now in orbit around the main belt asteroid Vesta! Yay!
The spacecraft entered orbit around the main belt asteroid on Saturday, July 15. Two days later — today — it snapped this spectacular high-res image:
[Click to enprotoplanetate.]
Wow, what a mess! As expected, it’s littered with craters, but there are some interesting things to note. Some craters appear to be very deep, while others are shallow — that indicates a different type of terrain (asteroidain?) where the impactors hit (although in some cases it might be a lighting effect; a more direct sunlight angle makes craters look shallow). The grooves I mentioned in a previous post are everywhere, some looking more like scarps (cliffs) now. And look at that huge cliff on the upper right! I’ll be very curious to see that area at different angles. Is it part of a big basin, a collapse feature? Or is it a cliff caused by cracking in the surface? By the way, that lump in the center casting a shadow to the left is actually a mountain or mound of some kind well over ...
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