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Asteroid Vesta portrayed in rainbow hues

New views of the massive asteroid Vesta reveal that it is more like a planet than an asteroid, scientists said Monday.
Image: Vesta in exaggerated color
This image using color data obtained by the framing camera aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows Vesta's southern hemisphere in color, centered on the Rheasilvia formation. Scientists assigned different colors for the ratios of two wavelengths of radiation detected by the framing camera to indicate areas that are relatively redder or bluer. The black hole in the middle is data that have been omitted due to the angle between the sun, Vesta and the spacecraft.NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA
/ Source: msnbc.com staff and news service reports

New views of the massive asteroid Vesta reveal that it is more like a planet than an asteroid, scientists said Monday.

Since slipping into orbit around Vesta in July, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has beamed back stunning images of the second largest object residing in the asteroid belt.

Vesta's rugged surface is unique compared to the solar system's much smaller and lightweight asteroids. Impact craters dot Vesta's surface along with grooves, troughs and a variety of minerals.

One of the images unveiled Monday shows the surface of Vesta in exaggerated, bright colors. The colors were assigned to show different types of rocks and minerals. The rainbow-hued picture told scientists that the surface materials contain the iron-bearing mineral pyroxene, and are a mixture of rapidly cooled surface rocks and a deeper layer that cooled more slowly.

"Vesta's iron core makes it special and more like terrestrial planets than a garden-variety asteroid," Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release.  "The distinct compositional variation and layering that we see at Vesta appear to derive from internal melting of the body shortly after formation, which separated Vesta into crust, mantle and core.

Vishnu Reddy, a member of the framing camera team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, said that Vesta is "unlike any other asteroid."

The new findings were presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Most asteroids resemble potatoes, but Vesta is more like an avocado with its iron core, Reddy said.

Asteroids are remnants from the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, around the same time as the formation of the rocky planets including Earth. Studying asteroids can offer clues about how our planetary system began.

Instead of returning to the moon, NASA has decided to land astronauts on a yet-to-be determined asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars.

David Williams of Arizona State University considers Vesta a "transitional body" between rocky planets and the thousands of asteroids floating between Mars and Jupiter.

The mission has yielded a mystery. Before Dawn arrived at Vesta, scientists predicted that the surface would harbor a volcano. There's a hill on Vesta, but researchers said there's no evidence of lava flow or volcanic deposits.

Williams said it's possible the volcanic materials are buried, so the team will keep looking.

Powered by ion propulsion instead of conventional rocket fuel, Dawn will study Vesta for several more months before cruising to an even bigger asteroid, Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015.

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