Dawn Has Vesta’s Dark Materials In View NASA Jet Propulsion
Laboratory A new study of images from NASA’s Dawn mission
examines remarkable, dark-as-coal material that speckles the
surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. Scientists are using the
images, taken by Dawn’s framing camera, to understand the impact
environment early in Vesta’s evolution. In the most
comprehensive analysis of the dark material to date, Dawn
scientists describe how this carbon-rich material tends to
appear around the edges of two giant impact basins in Vesta’s
southern hemisphere. The analysis suggests that the dark
material was most likely delivered by the object that created
the older of the two basins, known as Veneneia, about 2 to 3
billion years ago. Some of those materials were later covered up
by the impact that created the younger basin, Rheasilvia. The
paper, published in the November-December issue of the journal
Icarus, was led by Vishnu Reddy of the Max Planck Institute for
Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, an