Dawn at Vesta

The asteroid Vesta, photographed from the spacecraft Dawn. Dawn has been flying around the asteroid belt for five years. Vesta is one of the largest asteroids known and Dawn has been studying it lately. Dawn entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011. Following a year at Vesta, the spacecraft departed in July 2012 for Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015.

This image of the asteroid Vesta, calculated from a shape model, shows a tilted view of the topography of the south polar region. The image has a resolution of about 1,000 feet (300 meters) per pixel, and the vertical scale is 1.5 times that of the horizontal scale.

This perspective shows the topography, but removes the overall curvature of Vesta, as if the giant asteroid were flat and not rounded. An observer on Vesta would not have a view like this, because the distant features would disappear over the curvature of the horizon. (In the same way, if you were standing in North America, you would not be able to see a tall Mt. Everest in the distance, because of Earth's curvature.)

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.