Dark Crater Rims These mosaic images from NASA's Dawn mission
show how dark, carbon-rich materials tend to speckle the rims of
smaller craters or their immediate surroundings on the giant
asteroid Vesta. The image on the left is Numisia Crater and the
image on the right is a shallow, unnamed crater in the Sextilia
quadrangle. The left-hand image was obtained by Dawn's framing
camera during its low-altitude mapping orbit phase, about 130
miles (210 kilometers) above the surface. The image on the right
was obtained during Dawn's high-altitude mapping orbit, about
420 miles (680 kilometers) above the surface. The images have
been photometrically corrected. North is up. 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.
UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn
framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of
the Max Planck Inst