Post by Prof. Dr. Ralf Jaumann and Dr. Mary C. Bourke,

German Aerospace Center, Berlin, Germany. 

Department of Geography, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

The NASA Dawn spacecraft was launched in September 2007 to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system’s earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formation. Ceres and Vesta reside in the extensive zone between Mars and Jupiter together with many other smaller bodies, called the asteroid belt. Each has followed a very different evolutionary path constrained by the diversity of processes that operated during the first few million years of solar system evolution. The Dawn mission entered orbit around Vesta on 16 July 2011 for a one-year exploration and left orbit on 5 September 2012 heading towards Ceres.

Image A. A composite digital terrain model, and high resolution albedo mosaic and imbedded color channels of three cratres on the surface of Vesta. The image is composed of many individual photographs taken between October and December 2011 by Dawn’s framing camera during the high-altitude mapping orbit, at about 680 kilometers above Vesta’s surface. The image is centered on ~ 13° north latitude and ~ 195° eastern longitude. South is to the top of the image. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

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