Detailed new images released at a press conference streamed live on NASA’s website on Aug. 1 revealed exciting discoveries about Vesta’s composition and structures.
Vesta is the largest asteroid in the solar system.
“We’re exploring some of the last uncharted worlds in the inner solar system,” Marc Rayman, chief engineer and mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said at the press conference.
According to Charles Elachi, director of JPL, Vesta’s history goes back to the first 5 million years of the solar system. The material that was orbiting what would become the sun began to condense, and when Vesta was about to be formed, it seems that a supernova added radioactive materials to it, providing Vesta with a heat source.
Color photos of Vesta produced from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIR-MS) show the dramatic mineral and temperature emission contrast on different regions of the asteroid. This implies that Vesta’s surface is not uniform, but that different regions contain different materials and form different types of rocks.
Although Vesta has grooves in both its northern and southern regions, the two poles differ greatly from each other, and the south pole is smoother with fewer craters.
“Vesta is so rich in features that it would keep the science team busy for years,” said Holger Sierks, a framing cameraman from the Max Planck Society, at the conference.
A set of three craters located in the northern hemisphere was named the “Snowman.” According to Sierks, these three craters seem to be channeled, filled with debris, and have sharp rims, with downhill landslides in some areas.
“As the mission progresses, we will be taking data at higher and higher resolution that will enable us to understand the surface processes and interior processes better,” Elachi said at the conference.
