The Dawn space probe left the giant asteroid Vesta a little more than a year ago but the work on the data collected went on. An atlas of Vesta was created by bringing together approximately 10,000 images taken by the Framing Camera, one of theinstruments of the Dawn spacecraft, at an altitude of about 210 km (about 130 miles). This atlas is now online and accessible by anybody here and here.

A phase of the mission of the Dawn spacecraft was called Low Altitude Mapping Orbit (LAMO). It was used to create a complete map of Vesta which was presented last week at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) held in London. The presentation was conducted by Dr. Thomas Roatsch of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt (DLR), the German space agency, which has contributed to the Dawn mission.

The atlas consists of 29 maps that use three different projections: the Mercator for the equatorial regions, the Lambert Conformal Conic for the medium altitudes and the stereographic for the Rheasilvia basin at the south pole of Vesta. A complete map of this giant asteroid would include 30 maps but when the pictures were taken it was winter in its northern hemisphere so the north pole was in total darkness. For this reason, the thirtieth map is blank.

The maps created have a scale very similar to the regional tourist maps, where an centimeter is equivalent to about 2 kilometers (an inch is equivalent to a bit more than 3 miles). They allow among other things to see the extreme characteristics of a celestial body relatively small such as Vesta. Given a base point of reference, at the south pole crater Severina reaches a depth of about 18 km (about 11 miles) and at a distance of only 100 km (about 60 miles) there’s a peak that reaches a height of about 7 km (about 4 miles).

The mapping of a planet is a long job but its regular shape makes it relatively easy. Vesta is probably a protoplanet whose development has been blocked by the gravity of nearby Jupiter and being in an asteroid belt it suffered many impacts, also with celestial bodies with a comparable size, that have made its shape a bit irregular. For this reason, the atlas is inevitably a bit approximate.

The deeper understanding of Vesta is allowing a better understanding of the early stages of the solar system’s formation because this giant asteroid is a kind of fossil of that era. Its history can tell us something about the history of the planets, including Earth.

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