NASA today released the first image obtained by the Dawn spacecraft of
the giant asteroid Vesta. The spacecraft should enter the protoplanet's orbit on July 16, when Vesta is about 117 million miles from Earth.
The image from Dawn's framing cameras was taken on May 3 when the
spacecraft began its approach and was approximately 752,000 miles
(1.21 million km) from Vesta. The asteroid appears as a small, bright
pearl against a background of stars. Vesta also is known as a
protoplanet, because it is a large body that almost formed into a
planet."After plying the seas of space for more than a billion miles, the
Dawn team finally spotted its target," said Carol Raymond, Dawn's
deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "This first image hints of detailed
portraits to come from Dawn's upcoming visit."Vesta is 330 miles (530 km) in diameter and the second most massive
object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes
obtained images of the bright orb for about two centuries, but with
little surface detail.
The processed image you see in this blog post was taken at a distance of about 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles).
Since Vesta is so bright that it outshines its starry background, Dawn team members commanded a long exposure time to make the stars visible. They corrected the resulting exaggerated size of Vesta by superimposing a short exposure image of the target asteroid, showing its true size.
More here about Dawn, and higher resolution versions of the image.
