Severina Crater

This Dawn FC (framing camera) image shows Severina crater. This is the large crater, approximately 25 kilometers (15 miles) in diameter, visible at the top of the image. Severina crater has a fresh, sharp rim and a smaller, presumably younger, crater on its rim. There is an interestingly shaped small crater within Severina. This crater is roughly rectangular in shape, possibly because it is the result of two craters merging together or possibly because it is ¬the result of erosion and slumping of one crater. Below Severina is a smaller, shallower crater with a less fresh rim. Surrounding Severina is a ridged and grooved terrain, which is characteristic of the southern region of Vesta.

This image is located in Vesta's Rheasilvia quadrangle, near Vesta's south pole. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 22, 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.

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