page_title: 4 Vesta
section_title: Other craters
hierarchical_section_title: 4 Vesta / Surface features / Other craters
caption_attribution_description: English: Flowing in, Flowing out of Aelia http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17661 This colorful composite image from NASA's Dawn mission shows the flow of material inside and outside a crater called Aelia on the giant asteroid Vesta. The area is around 14 degrees south latitude. The images that went into this composite were obtained by Dawn's framing camera from September to October 2011. To the naked eye, these structures would not be seen. But here, they stand out in blue and red. The crater has a diameter of 2.7 miles (4.3 kilometers). The exact origin of the flow structures is unknown. A possible explanation is that the impact that produced the crater could have created liquid material with different minerals than the surroundings. The composite image was created by assigning ratios of color information collected from several color filters in visible light and near-infrared light to maximize subtle differences in lithology (the physical characteristics of rock units, such as color, texture and composition). The color scheme pays special attention to the iron-rich mineral pyroxene. The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The University of California, Los Angeles, is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR and NASA. More information about Dawn is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.
context_page_description: Vesta is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, with a mean diameter of 525 kilometres. It was discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers on 29 March 1807 and is named after Vesta, the virgin goddess of home and hearth from Roman mythology.
  Vesta is the second-most-massive and probably the second-largest asteroid, after the dwarf planet Ceres, and contributes an estimated 9% of the mass of the asteroid belt. It is probably slightly larger than Pallas, but is about 25% more massive. Vesta is the only known remaining rocky protoplanet of the kind that formed the terrestrial planets. Numerous fragments of Vesta were ejected by collisions one and two billion years ago that left two enormous craters occupying much of Vesta's southern hemisphere. Debris from these events has fallen to Earth as howardite–eucrite–diogenite meteorites, which have been a rich source of information about Vesta.
  Vesta is the brightest asteroid visible from Earth. Its maximum distance from the Sun is slightly greater than the minimum distance of Ceres from the Sun, though its orbit lies entirely within that of Ceres.
context_section_description: Several old, degraded craters rival Rheasilvia and Veneneia in size, though none are quite so large. They include Feralia Planitia, shown at right, which is 270 km across. More-recent, sharper craters range up to 158 kilometres (98 mi) Varronilla and 196 kilometres (122 mi) Postumia.
caption: Aelia Crater
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