Dawn Sees New Surface Features on Giant Asteroid

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Source:  NASA Dawn Mission
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has revealed unexpected details on the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. Vesta is the only asteroid in the so-called main belt between Mars and Jupiter visible to the naked eye from Earth. Carbon-rich asteroids may have hit Vesta at speeds low enough to produce some of the smaller deposits without blasting away the surface. Higher-speed asteroids also could have hit Vesta's surface and melted the volcanic basaltic crust, darkening existing surface material. That melted conglomeration appears in the walls and floors of impact craters, on hills and ridges, and underneath brighter, more recent material called ejecta, which is material thrown out from a space rock impact.

 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/main/index.html

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