Eusebia Crater

This Dawn framing camera (FC) image of Vesta shows Eusebia crater, which is the large crater in the top right of the image. Eusebia crater is approximately 26 kilometers (16 miles) in diameter and has a reasonably fresh rim. Like many other craters on Vesta, Eusebia's rim is irregularly shaped and there are ridges and gullies forming just below the rim inside of the crater. These ridges and gullies are visible on the right side of Eusebia. There are also many smaller craters, with diameters of less than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile), located inside of Eusebia. These smaller craters must be younger than Eusebia because if they were older they would have been destroyed by the impact that formed Eusebia.

This image is located in Vesta's Tuccia quadrangle, in Vesta's southern hemisphere. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 11, 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 68 meters (223 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.