Dawn Spacecraft Creates Guide to Vesta’s Hidden Attractions

Some beauty is revealed only at a second glance. When viewed with the human eye, the giant asteroid Vesta is quite unspectacular. But when scientists investigate more deeply, they uncover beauty.

Some beauty is revealed only at a second glance. When viewed with the human eye, the giant asteroid Vesta, which was the object of scrutiny by the Dawn spacecraft from 2011 to 2012, is quite unspectacular. Vesta looks grayish, pitted by a variety of large and small craters.

But scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, have re-analyzed the images obtained by Dawn’s framing camera. They assigned colors to different wavelengths of light and, in the process, revealed in unprecedented detail not only geological structures that are invisible to the naked eye, but also beautiful landscapes.

Researchers at Max Planck now can see structures such as melts from impacts, craters buried by quakes and foreign material brought by space rocks.

“The key to these images is the seven color filters of the camera system on board the spacecraft,” said Andreas Nathues, the framing camera team lead at Max Planck. Since different minerals reflect light of different wavelengths to different degrees, the filters help reveal compositional differences that remain hidden without them.

In the new colorized images, different colors indicate different materials on the surface of Vesta. They reveal impressive formations and a wide range of geological diversity, Nathues said. But above all, the color-coded images are impressive because of their beauty.

“No artist could paint something like that. Only nature can do this,” said Martin Hoffman, a member of the framing camera team also at Max Planck. Pictures of the crater Aelia (above), the crater Antonia and an area near the crater Sextilia show some of Vesta’s most impressive sites.