This Dawn framing camera (FC) image of Vesta shows Justina crater, which is the crater surrounded by bright material, in the bottom left of the image. Justina crater has a reasonably degraded rim and is roughly 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) in diameter. It is a distinctive crater because of the bright blanket of ejecta material that surrounds it on nearly all sides. There is a gap in this bright material on the right side of Justina. There also appears to be bright material slumping into Justina, which partly obscures its rim in some places. A patch of dark material is located on the right side of the crater. Justina is surrounded by sinuous ridges and grooves, which are characteristic of Vesta’s southern hemisphere.
This image is located in Vesta’s Urbinia quadrangle, in Vesta’s southern hemisphere. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 22, 2011. This image was taken through the camera’s clear filter. The distance to the surface of Vesta is 700 kilometers (435 miles) and the image has a resolution of about 65 meters (213 feet) per pixel. This image was acquired during the HAMO (high-altitude mapping orbit) phase of the mission.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington D.C. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The Framing Camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.
More information about Dawn is online at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA