The mission of the space probe Dawn is allowing us to discover more and more information about Vesta, the second celestial object in size in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter after dwarf planet Ceres.
The Dawn spacecraft reached Vesta in July and started sending lots of data about it making us increasingly understand that it’s a quite unique celestial object in various ways.
Previous observations, made in part with the Hubble Space Telescope, allowed us to find a number of Vesta’s craters, especially a particularly large one near its South Pole. Also in that region, the Dawn spacecraft has captured images released by NASA a few months ago of a mountain three times higher than Mount Everest.
Now NASA has released an image of Vesta’s southern hemisphere colored with a rainbow palette assigned to indicate different materials. The various pictures taken by the Dawn space probe from its visible light and infrared instruments have made it possible to distinguish different types of minerals yet to be identified with precision. The image has a central hole due to an unfavorable angle between Vesta, the Dawn spacecraft and the Sun, which has prevented from obtaining a complete picture.
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The observations indicate a layered structure that have been excavated by the many impacts suffered by Vesta during its history. Its core should be composed of iron and nickel, which perhaps were melted shortly after Vesta’s formation of and then cooled down over time, forming the various layers.
The over ten thousand images of Vesta sent by the Dawn probe confirm the hypothesis that this large asteroid is actually a protoplanet, similar to the Earth in the first phase of its formation. Vesta hasn’t grown to become a real planet due to disturbance caused in the asteroid belt by Jupiter’s powerful gravity that make the coalescence among the many small celestial bodies quite difficult. However, the characteristics of Vesta that scientists are discovering could persuade them to reclassify it as a dwarf planets.
Vesta has already reserved some surprises and the Dawn spacecraft will continue to study it until July 2012, when it will leave for the dwarf planet Ceres. In the coming months we can expect more surprises from a mission which in its first phase is already a success.
