Nice! I don't suppose that could be made available for download?

Any idea of what we are looking at? northern or southern hemisphere? it would be nice if the release had some context, not just the picture...

First I will try some mapping, I don't know if it would be possible without image geometry data (maybe Phil could do it). I will upload it then.

Northern hemisphere. I recognise the shape of the scar at the top of the image. That darker curved mark is the same that was visible in one of the press release images.

Let me correct you quickly the shadowed part on the top left is in the northern hemisphere, but the equator basically runs in diagonal from top left to bottom right. See the annotated image. I will keep helping you with the orientation until someone prepares a map that can help you all. In the meantime, try not to guess. As soon as I have a chance I will give you the orientation of the images.
Tayfun, your shape model is outstanding!

It looks like a flow of some sort to me. Post-impact volcanism? (by impact, I mean the little guy which seems to be the "source" of the digitate flows, or maybe that is the end of a flow....)

Quick reprojection using one global image from HD animation (thanks Emily for images and Dawn team for animation!).

First, part of it seems to be draped over a crater, so it probably settled down from above.

Second, it seems to originate at that crater (or whatever) on the bottom.

Is the curviness of the dark streak real, or is it due to the viewing angle of an irregular surface?

There is something very unusual about that "flow" if that is what it is. If it were molten rock (or liquid of any kind) it would necessarily follow the contours of that last crater it crosses; either pool up in the bottom of it, or if the crater is on a slope then the flow would follow a circular path along the crater's wall. Instead it looks as though this dark feature was draped across the body from above like strands of hair or a veil. It has to have been deposited from above -- something like dust or fine particles continuously ejected downrange from it's source.

(enlarged and contrast enhanced crop)

Yeah I was thinking that too, otherwise it flowed "uphill" and out of some of those craters.

-kap

Wow, this looks extremely interesting and nice. I'm planning to do a 3D model of Vesta by running stereo imagery through my stereo processing software but doubt I'll be doing it until the data is released at the PDS so I was disappointed to see that apparently that's not going to happen until about 18 months from now.

As a matter of curiosity, how did you create this 3D model? It looks remarkably detailed keeping in mind limitations in the source data (no viewing geometry information etc.).

Another interpretation:

The "flow" could be a chance alignment of dark rays from two separate craters, and some topographic grooves.

In the image,

Click to view attachment

purple shows rays from the larger crater, green shows rays from the smaller crater, and orange is interpreted as part of a system of linear valleys, some of which can be seen extending beyond the "flow" zone. Pink shows what could be rays from either crater.

The dark stuff in the troughs could be exposed darker material, or the albedo effect of differing grain sizes, as could be the case with the features in the SP basin.

On the previously release full-frame image, the prominent dark crater also has some dark rays:

Click to view attachment

Whoo-hoo! The July 31 image almost perfectly matches up to the filtered false-color image released as PIA14325.

Here is a blink animation between the two (I had to warp PIA14325:

Click to view attachment
[Animated GIF: Click to animate]

The dark albedo area corresponds to the dark blue streak. It begins at a splat that is likely yellowish white like it's neighbors. And look at those other splatty features as well! The large flat-floored crater at the upper right ("Brachiopod Crater") that has a small indent from another impact is pretty distinctive in the global map mosaic and other images of Vesta. I've been using that as a identification feature. It is pretty average looking in the false-color spectra. But look at the detail around the large crater south of it. WOW! Lotsa different stuff.

Also note that the grooves do not show up in the false color image. They blend with the "average terrain" (constraining the ring hypotheses).

[Corrected based on comments from Pablo below]

Just a precision, the PIA14325 is a color composite of three filters of the Framing Camera. No offense for VIR, they are remarkable in many aspects, but this image is not a product of theirs.

Static image, detail enhanced in colorized region using multiple HiPass filters, also contrast regionally contrast-adjusted:

Click to view attachment

It was made from the rotation movie by first tracking the camera and creating the viewing geometry. Then a point cloud was generated and it was filtered and turned into a Poisson mesh. As you say there is not any viewing geometry data yet and this seems to be the only way to get a decent model. However mapping will be more tricky, I will try to fix the pole & equator from the published map.

Wow, that's pretty amazing stuff! I have no idea whatsoever how you computer warlocks generate things like that, but I'm very glad you can!

Just for fun, here's Vesta on a collision course with itself.

(It's my desktop for the moment )
Click to view attachment

An edges map. It highlights a bit the age of the surface:
Click to view attachment

Here's my interpretation of the rotation movie. (Thanks Emily for the frames!) The frame rate interpolation isn't as smooth as Tayfun's, unfortunately:

http://youtu.be/eBHgcTxhG-Y?hd=1

Any word yet on a detected magnetic field for Vesta? If present (and strong enough) it could have interesting effects on metallic or ionized ejecta as well as surface aging by solar ions, as seen on a few locations on the Moon.

Hi, I'm stich images into Spherical panorama. Only North is black.

Adam

Click to view attachment


and this funny version of stich

Click to view attachment

Very nice, Adam!

Algorimancer - there is no magnetometer on Dawn. It had to be removed due to mass limitations earlier in the design phase.

Phil

Adam wov! The funny version is really nice.

A question: is the central peak of the south polar basin at the south pole or offset from it?

The de-rotation of the image to a constant north-up orientation is very nice. Perhaps you could give Tayfun the de-rotated frames for him to produce a super-dooper soft-rotating north-up movie!

Tayfun -- is this something more than just pixels on the screen? That is, is it something you can make a physical object from?

Chuck

I believe the magnetometer was removed for budget reasons. A loss for science for reasons you noted.

Craig

It is a detailed 3D model, only a small area near the north pole (where there is no photographic data) is missing.

from a Nature article on the mission:

So presumably, if all systems continue moving along smoothly, that missing info will fill in pretty quickly?

And what is needed for you to locate poles, equator, and the rest of a lat-long grid?

Chuck

I've had a second crack at smoothing the rotated movie, and it's looking much better:

http://youtu.be/eBHgcTxhG-Y?hd=1

We'll have to wait for northern spring to fill in that missing data. (Anyone know when the Vestian equinox is?)

An orbit is 1325 days. So solstice to equinox is 331 days. I assume we are past solstice and going toward equinox--and therefore less than 331 days, but I'm only a microbiologist.

It's really too bad. I can't imagine how a magnetometer would represent a large cost component. It's not a complicated device. There's probably a magnetometer app available for my Droid.

As I recall, I don't think it was going to be a large cost component but somewhat intensive in man hours for testing since the type hadn't been flown before, and they were already behind schedule.

yes, magnetometers on spacecraft are simple devices but they need lots of testing because of the risk of interference from the metallic structure of the spacecraft itself...

There's already a paper Vesta model available!
Click to view attachment
http://www.koyalwholesale.com/pages-produc...s_6_pieces.html

I'm just wondering - if the mass in the pre-planetary solar system was concentrated into a disk, how is it possible for a body like Vesta to get smacked in the South Pole? If the impact site was at the south pole prior to the hit, then the impactor would have to have come from outside the ecliptic. If the impact site was not at the south pole before the impact, how could the impact have re-oriented things to put it there?

Gotta remember that the 'disk' was undoubtedly millions of km thick at least, first of all. Also, I'm sure that the early Solar System was pretty chaotic indeed, with lots of stuff bumping into each other quite often, and frequently at oblique angles to boot. It's not beyond the pale at all to postulate a medium population of out-of-ecliptic bodies in the inner Solar System back in the day.

And, of course, it could have been a long-period comet. Those things often have quite funky orbits indeed.

Given two orbits that are inclined only by a degree or two of each other, if the two meet where the orbits intersect, from each body, the other will appear to be approaching from outside the ecliptic plane.

This quick drawing shows the orbits of two bodies with small inclinations, with a polar collision where the two meet.

the stable (minimum energy) rotation of an ellipsoid is with the spin axis passing through its shortest axis. so even if the impact was not at the south pole (and it probably wasn't) the stable rotation configuration required the crater to end up at one of the poles

Also, during the early solar system most of your nearby objects would be orbiting in similar orbits with you, and collisions would be relatively low velocity. Two Vesta sized objects hitting each other, for example, would only hit at 2x escape velocity, or about .7 km/sec. Now, once Jupiter migrates inwards, it tends to scramble the orbits of the planetesimals, and so collisions could be between objects with vastly different semimajor axis, ie an object at Vesta could only be passing through due to eccentricity. As H4I shows above, an object with only a slight inclination difference results in essentially a polar hit. Also, it's difficult to tell the angle of the impact using debris except very roughly because of the energies involved, and might not even be possible with an impact of this size.

Really disappointing to hear the magnetometer didn't make it onto the vehicle. Considering the nature of Vesta & Ceres, that's quite a loss.

Here is the simplified Vesta model. I fitted a sphere to the detailed model which even shows the grooves. As we don't yet have geometry information, the polygon lines do not necessarily pass through long/lat lines and poles of the model may not be at the real poles. It is also not to scale.

Hey -- I can import and open this file in my VectorWorks program!

Thank you, Tayfun.

Hey Chuck, looks like you have a new place to apply your mapping technique!

I took the frames posted by Emily, created anaglyphs from each sequential pair, and assembled them into an animated gif to show the rotating body in 3D. The full sized version is 17 megs. In order to reduce the file size to something that I can upload here I had to reduce the size to 25% and cut the range of colors in half.

The full sized version is much nicer than what I have to post here. I can't find a site that will host a large animated gif. Flickr won't take it and the animation doesn't work on Picasa. If anyone has any suggestions for a place to host the big file, please let me know.

************************************

Sorry. Apparently it was a few bytes larger than allowed. I'll go back to the drawing board to see if there is anything else I can do to shrink this file without totally destroying the imagery.

Tom, can you link it to an external site? That would work. (MOST anxious to see this; it sounds great!!!)

Nick: I tried Flickr and Picasa Web Albums without success. That's why I was asking if anyone knew of another site that accepted this kind of file. A few years ago I made one of these of Itokawa and a certain friend of umsf hosted it. Since Vesta is roughly spherical, it does not appear quite as exciting in 3D as Itokawa did, but it is still nice to see it in stereo.