Giant asteroid poses for its 'close-up'

PASADENA, Calif., July 19 (UPI) -- NASA's Dawn spacecraft has sent back its first close-up image of the asteroid Vesta after entering orbit around the rocky giant, the space agency said.

The image shows Vesta, at 330 miles in diameter the second-most massive object in the asteroid belt, in greater detail than ever before, a NASA release said Monday.

While ground- and space-based telescopes have obtained images of Vesta for almost two centuries, they have never been able to see much detail on its surface, scientists said.

"We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system," said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell from the University of California, Los Angeles.

"This region of space has been ignored for far too long," he said. "So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta's history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons."

Although orbit capture is complete, Dawn will continue to draw closer to Vesta for the next three weeks, scientists said.

"It is fantastically exciting that we will begin providing humankind its first detailed views of one of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.