Take a Virtual Tour of Vesta With New High-Resolution Images | WPN World People News

An atlas of the giant asteroid Vesta, created from images taken as NASA's Dawn mission flew around the object (also known as a protoplanet), is now accessible for the public to explore online. The set of maps was created from mosaics of 10,000 images taken by Dawn's framing camera instrument at a low altitude of about 130 miles (210 kilometers).

If you could drive a car around the giant Asteroid Vesta, you would need a road map akin to the atlas of images released from NASA's Dawn mission. Twenty-nine new maps of the asteroid, one of which is shown here, show its mountains and craters at a scale similar to that of common road maps.

The maps are mostly at a scale about that of regional road-touring maps, where every inch of map is equivalent to a little more than 3 miles of asteroid (1 centimeter equals 2 kilometers).

"Creating the atlas has been a painstaking task -- each map sheet of this series has used roughly 400 images," said Thomas Roatsch of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany, who presented the images Sept. 11 at the European Planetary Science Congress 2013 in London.

"The atlas shows how extreme the terrain is on a body the size of Vesta. In the south pole projection alone, the Severina crater contours reach a depth of 11 miles [18 kilometers]; just over 60 miles [100 kilometres] away from the mountain peak towers about 4 miles [7 kilometers] high."

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory