PIA15797: Apparent Brightness and Topography Images of Canuleia Crater
 Target Name:  Vesta
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Dawn
 Spacecraft:  Dawn
 Instrument:  Framing Camera
 Product Size:  2400 x 1400 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  JPL
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA15797.tif (10.09 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA15797.jpg (257.4 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

The left-hand image is a Dawn FC (framing camera) image, which shows the apparent brightness of Vesta's surface. The right-hand image is based on this apparent brightness image, which has had a color-coded height representation of the topography overlain onto it. The topography is calculated from a set of images that were observed from different viewing directions, which allows stereo reconstruction. The various colors correspond to the height of the area. The white and red areas in the topography image are the highest areas and the blue areas are the lowest areas. Canuleia crater is a relatively large crater in the top left of the images. In the brightness image there are many streaks of bright material clearly visible around the crater. There is also one streak of dark material on the left side of the crater. The topography image highlights the bowl shape of Canuleia and the ridges and grooves that run diagonally across the bottom part of the image. These ridges and grooves are characteristic of Vesta's southern hemisphere.

These images are located in Vesta's Urbinia quadrangle, in Vesta's southern hemisphere. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained the brightness image with its framing camera on Oct. 27, 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 70 meters (230 feet) per pixel. This image was acquired during the HAMO (high-altitude mapping orbit) phase of the mission. These images are lambert-azimuthal map projected.

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://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Image Addition Date:
2012-06-13