Vesta reveals its scars

Nasa's Dawn spacecraft has returned some remarkable new imagery of the asteroid Vesta, BBC reports.

The pictures reveal the ancient body's craters, slopes and grooves in detail that is far beyond the vision of Earth-bound telescopes, including Hubble.

Dawn scientists will have a busy year interpreting the asteroid's features.

They will be looking for some fresh insight on how such objects came into being 4.6 billion years ago.
It is often said the asteroids, which dominate a region of space between Mars and Jupiter, are the rubble that was left over after the planets proper had formed.

"We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the Solar System," said Dawn's principal investigator Christopher Russell from the University of California, Los Angeles.

"This region of space has been ignored for far too long. So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta's history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons."

Dawn's quest at Vesta over the coming months is to undertake a comprehensive survey.

Once it has completed its work at Vesta, the probe will move on to the even bigger rock, Ceres. With a diameter of roughly 950km, this world has a much more rounded shape and is classed as a "dwarf planet", the same designation now ascribed to Pluto.