As NASA's Dawn spacecraft travels to its next destination, this mosaic
synthesizes some of the best views the spacecraft had of the giant
asteroid Vesta. Dawn studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. The
towering mountain at the south pole - more than twice the height of
Mount Everest - is visible at the bottom of the image. The set of three
craters known as the "snowman" can be seen at the top left.
These images are the last in Dawn's Image of the Day series during the
cruise to Dawn's second destination, Ceres. A full set of Dawn data is
being archived at http://pds.nasa.gov/ .
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 D.C. UCLA
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/JPL.
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