3-D View of Dark-Stained Cornelia

This composite-color view from NASA's Dawn mission shows Cornelia Crater, streaked with dark materials, on the giant asteroid Vesta. The data were obtained by Dawn's framing camera during the mission's high-altitude mapping orbit, about 420 miles (680 kilometers) above the surface. The images were integrated into a mosaic and wrapped on a topographical model of Vesta's surface.

Scientists colorized the picture by assigning red to the 0.75-micron wavelength, green to the 0.92-micron wavelength and blue to the 0.98-micron wavelength.

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 were 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.