Apparent Brightness and Topography Images of Aquilia Crater

The left-hand image is a Dawn FC (framing camera) image, which shows the apparent brightness of Vesta's surface. The right-hand image is based on this apparent brightness image, which has had a color-coded height representation of the topography overlain onto it. The topography is calculated from a set of images that were observed from different viewing directions, which allows stereo reconstruction. The various colors correspond to the height of the area. The white and red areas in the topography image are the highest areas and the blue areas are the lowest areas. Aquilia crater is the large crater that dominates the top part of both images. The three-dimensional structure of Aquilia is clearer in the topography image: the deepest part of the crater (colored blue) is offset from the crater's center, the smaller crater on Aquila's rim is also relatively deep and the top side of Aquila is steeper than the opposite side.

These images are located in Vesta's Pinaria quadrangle, in Vesta's southern hemisphere. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained the apparent brightness 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 70 meters (230 feet) per pixel. This image was acquired during the HAMO (high-altitude mapping orbit) phase of the mission. These images are lambert-azimuthal map projected.

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 Dawn is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.