A few days after the arrival of the Dawn spacecraft in the vicinity of the asteroid Vesta, NASA released the most detailed images ever taken of this celestial body.
The asteroid Vesta, formally designated 4 Vesta, was discovered in 1807. It’s the second body for mass among the ones in the asteroid belt after the dwarf planet Ceres with a diameter of about 530 km (330 miles). Additional studies initiated by the space probe Dawn among the other things could lead to a change of Vesta’s status from asteroid to dwarf planet.
According to many astronomers Vesta is a protoplanet which would’ve continued to grow if it weren’t for Jupiter, which influences the orbits of celestial bodies in the asteroid belt with its strong gravity.
The Dawn space probe went into orbit around Vesta in mid-July and started taking many photographs of the asteroid, revealing craters and other geological features. The Hubble Space Telescope observations already showed the huge crater near the south pole of Vesta. The violent impact with another asteroid may have also indirectly caused the grooves in the equatorial zone as a result of tectonic activity originated from the collision.
The other instruments of the Dawn probe are the gamma ray and neutron detectors and an infrared spectrometer. Thanks to them it can measure the energy of subatomic particles emitted from the top layer of Vesta and make measurements of the asteroid surface mineralogy.
Using the Dawn spacecraft’s radio transmitter along with sensitive antennas on Earth it will be possible to monitor small changes in the gravitational field of Vesta to have more clues about its internal structure.
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Studies of Vesta by the Dawn spacecraft will continue for about a year. In July 2012 Dawn will use again its ion engine to leave for the dwarf planet Ceres, where it will arrive in February 2015 to proceed with analysis similar to those it recently started performing on Vesta.
The research produced during this long trip will help astronomers understand better what happened during the birth of the solar system as Vesta was formed at that time. Consequently not only our knowledge of the asteroid belt will improve but also of the evolution of the inner planets, including Earth.
We can hope that the knowledge that will be acquired about the asteroid belt will be useful when we finally reach it and possibly we’ll start using Vesta and Ceres as bases and asteroids will be exploited for their mineral contents.
