Image: Impact crater on Asteroid Vesta with an unusual rim

This Dawn FC (framing camera) image shows Caparronia crater, after which Caparronia quadrangle is named. Caparronia crater has an unusually shaped, irregular rim that is sharp and fresh in some areas and more rounded and degraded in others.

The floor of Caparronia crater is also unusual because it has an undulating topography and one large linear mound, which runs roughly vertically in this image. There are many smaller, younger craters superposed onto Caparronia and one reasonably large, fresher crater cuts across the top rim. Also, many linear grooves surround Caparronia crater.

This image is located in Vesta’s Caparronia quadrangle and the center of the image is 38.0 degrees north latitude, 166.7 degrees east longitude. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 23, 2011. This image was taken through the camera’s clear filter. The distance to the surface of Vesta is 700 kilometers (435 miles) and the image has a resolution of about 70 meters (230 feet) per pixel. This image was acquired during the HAMO (high-altitude mapping orbit) phase of the mission.

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 D.C. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been 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/JPL. Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDA