Amazingly Detailed New Maps of Asteroid Vesta

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Amazingly Detailed New Maps of Asteroid Vesta

Amazingly Detailed New Maps of Asteroid Vesta:

Artist's concept of the Dawn spacecraft arriving at Vesta. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Artist’s concept of the Dawn spacecraft arriving at Vesta. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Vesta is one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System. Comprising 9% of the mass in the Asteroid Belt, it is second in size only to the dwarf-planet Ceres. And now, thanks to data obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, Vesta’s surface has been mapped out in unprecedented detail.
These high-resolution geological maps reveal the variety of Vesta’s surface features and provide a window into the asteroid’s history.

“The geologic mapping campaign at Vesta took about two-and-a-half years to complete, and the resulting maps enabled us to recognize a geologic timescale of Vesta for comparison to other planets,” said David Williams of Arizona State University.

Geological mapping is a technique used to derive the geologic history of a planetary object from detailed analysis of surface morphology, topography, color and brightness information. The team found that Vesta’s geological history is characterized by a sequence of large impact events, primarily by the Veneneia and Rheasilvia impacts in Vesta’s early history and the Marcia impact in its late history.

The geologic mapping of Vesta was made possible by the Dawn spacecraft’s framing camera, which was provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research of the German Max Planck Society and the German Aerospace Center. This camera takes panchromatic images and seven bands of color-filtered images, which are used to create topographic models of the surface that aid in the geologic interpretation.

A team of 14 scientists mapped the surface of Vesta using Dawn data. The study was led by three NASA-funded participating scientists: Williams; R. Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute; and W. Brent Garry of the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center.

This high-res geological map of Vesta is derived from Dawn spacecraft data. Brown colors represent the oldest, most heavily cratered surface. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

This high-res geological map of Vesta is derived from Dawn spacecraft data. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

The brown colored sections of the map represent the oldest, most heavily cratered surface. Purple colors in the north and light blue represent terrains modified by the Veneneia and Rheasilvia impacts, respectively. Light purples and dark blue colors below the equator represent the interior of the Rheasilvia and Veneneia basins. Greens and yellows represent relatively young landslides or other downhill movement and crater impact materials, respectively.

The map indicates the prominence of impact events – such as the Veneneia, Rheasilvia and Marcia impacts, respectively – in shaping the asteroid’s surface. It also indicates that the oldest crust on Vesta pre-dates the earliest Veneneia impact. The relative timescale is supplemented by model-based absolute ages from two different approaches that apply crater statistics to date the surface.

“This mapping was crucial for getting a better understanding of Vesta’s geological history, as well as providing context for the compositional information that we received from other instruments on the spacecraft: the visible and infrared (VIR) mapping spectrometer and the gamma-ray and neutron detector (GRaND),” said Carol Raymond, Dawn’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The objective of NASA’s Dawn mission is to characterize the two most massive objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres.

These Hubble Space Telescope images of Vesta and Ceres show two of the most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region between Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA/European Space Agency

These Hubble Space Telescope images of Vesta and Ceres show two of the most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt. Credit: NASA/European Space Agency

Asteroids like Vesta are remnants of the formation of the solar system, giving scientists a peek at its early history. They can also harbor molecules that are the building blocks of life and reveal clues about the origins of life on Earth. Hence why scientists are eager to learn more about its secrets.

The Dawn spacecraft was launched in September of 2007 and orbited Vesta between July 2011 and September 2012. Using ion propulsion in spiraling trajectories to travel from Earth to Vesta, Dawn will orbit Vesta and then continue on to orbit the dwarf planet Ceres by April 2015.

The high resolution maps were included with a series of 11 scientific papers published this week in a special issue of the journal Icarus. The Dawn spacecraft is currently on its way to Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, and will arrive at Ceres in March 2015.

Further Reading: NASA

About Matt Williams

Author, freelance writer, educator, Taekwon-Do instructor, and loving hubby, son and Island boy!

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

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Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Wednesday, November 19, 2014