Dawn Image of Vesta: Octavia Crater

Octavia crater is the large crater that dominates the right side of the image. It has a scalloped shaped rim and the top part of the rim is more degraded than the rest. There are patches of dark and bright material cropping out from Octavia’s rim and slumping towards its center. There appear to be more patches of bright material than dark material but this might just be on account of the illumination conditions in the image. There is a large ridge near the center of the crater and another smaller ridge on its right-hand slope. These ridges were probably formed by the accumulation of material that slumped down the crater’s walls. The area surrounding Octavia has many smaller impact craters and narrow grooves, which run diagonally across the image.

This image is located in Vesta’s Marcia quadrangle and the center of the image, just south of Vesta’s equator. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 14, 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 63 meters (207 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. Larger image