These apparent brightness and topography images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft are located in asteroid Vesta's Floronia quadrangle, in Vesta's northern hemisphere.

The left-hand image is a Dawn FC (framing camera) image, which shows the apparent brightness of Vesta's surface. The right-hand image is based on this apparent brightness image, which has had a color-coded height representation of the topography overlain onto it. The topography is calculated from a set of images that were observed from different viewing directions, which allows stereo reconstruction. The various colors correspond to the height of the area. The white and red areas in the topography image are the highest areas and the blue areas are the lowest areas. Lepida crater is the large crater that dominates the bottom half of the image. Lepida has a fresh, irregularly shaped rim. There appears to be a smaller crater, which must be younger than Lepida crater, forming the bulge in the top part of Lepida's rim. The bottom rim of the smaller crater has blended into the side of Lepida, but it can still be partly distinguished. There are some mounds of material in the bottom of Lepida crater, which were probably deposited here as a result of mass movement of material down the crater's walls. These mounds cannot be too significant in height because they are not distinguished as a separate color in the topography image.



More information about Dawn is online at and

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