Bright Material Deposits in Crater Wall

This Dawn FC (framing camera) image shows a relatively fresh crater with bright deposits exposed in the crater wall that streak downslope on the giant asteroid Vesta.

The image covers an area in the cratered highlands, centered around 13.5 degrees north latitude and 218.9 east longitude. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Dec. 18, 2011. The distance to the surface of Vesta is 183 kilometers and the image has a resolution of about 25 meters per pixel. This image was acquired during the LAMO (Low 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. 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.

More information about the Dawn mission is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.