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Rubria and Occia Craters

May 9, 2012
This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft of asteroid Vesta shows Rubria and Occia craters. Both Rubria and Occia contain dark and bright material and both have reasonably sharp, well-defined and regularly shaped rims.

This Dawn framing camera (FC) image of Vesta shows Rubria and Occia craters. Rubria is the crater in the top center of the image and Occia is the crater just below the middle of the image on the right side. Both craters are similar in morphology and size, Rubria is approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) in diameter and Occia is approximately 7 kilometers (4 miles) in diameter. Both Rubria and Occia contain dark and bright material and both have reasonably sharp, well-defined and regularly shaped rims. The dark material in Rubria and Occia is generally confined into triangular segments of the craters, but the bright material is more evenly distributed. The boundaries between the dark and bright material in Rubria are more distinctly defined than in Occia.

This image is located in Vesta's Gegania quadrangle, south of Vesta's equator. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 16, 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 62 meters (203 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.

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