NASA Dawn Image: Undulating Terrain in Vesta’s Southern Hemisphere

This Dawn FC (framing camera) image shows some of the undulating terrain in Vesta’s southern hemisphere. This undulating terrain consists of linear, curving hills and depressions, which are most distinct in the right of the image. Many narrow, linear grooves run in various directions across this undulating terrain. There are some craters, less than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) in diameter, in the bottom of the image. These contain bright material and have bright material surrounding them. There are fewer craters in this image than in images from Vesta’s northern hemisphere; this is because Vesta’s northern hemisphere is generally more cratered than the southern hemisphere.

This image is located in Vesta’s Urbinia quadrangle and the center of the image is 63.0 degrees south latitude, 332.2 degrees east longitude. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 25, 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. Larger image