Asteroid Vesta

Views of the Solar System ^ | circa 2001 | Calvin J. Hamilton

[SunkenCiv]

The Hubble Space Telescope observed asteroid Vesta between November 28 and December 1, 1994, when Vesta was at a distance of 251 million kilometers (156 million miles) from Earth... Hubble images have revealed a diverse world with ancient lava flows and a gigantic impact basin that is so deep, it exposes the asteroid's subsurface, or mantle. Vesta's surface shows a geology similar to that of terrestrial worlds such as Earth and Mars. Ground-based spectroscopy of Vesta indicates regions that are basaltic, which means lava flows once occurred on its surface. This is surprising evidence that the asteroid once had a molten interior, like Earth does. This contradicts conventional ideas that asteroids are essentially cold, rocky fragments left behind from the early days of planetary formation... One or more large impacts tore away some of the crust, exposing a deeper mantle of olivine which is believed to constitute most of the Earth's mantle... The picture in the center is a color-encoded elevation map of Vesta which clearly shows the giant 285-mile diameter impact basin and "bull's-eye" central peak.

[SunkenCiv]

Seems like Ida read something about that by now.

[rimshot!]

[Pyro7480]

We'll get a closer look of Vesta in four years, with NASA's Dawn mission.

[SunkenCiv]

[this is related to message 10; found a bunch of stuff, which I'm going to plaster into another topic]

Koronis Family Asteroids Rotation Lightcurve Observing Program
Dr. Stephen M. Slivan
MIT, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Last modified 2006 May 29
http://www.koronisfamily.com/