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Ancient Impacts Stained Vesta with Carbon-Rich Material
Composite-color 3D image of Cornelia crater on Vesta (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
Ever since arriving at Vesta in July 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been capturing high-resolution images of the protoplanet’s surface, revealing a surprisingly varied and complex terrain covered in ridges, hills, grooves and, of course, craters of many different sizes and ages. Many of Vesta’s craters exhibit strange dark stains and splotches within and around them, some of them literally darker than coal. These stains have been a puzzle to scientists since they were first seen, but research now suggests that they may actually be the remains of the impacts that caused them: dark deposits left by the myriad of carbon-rich objects that struck Vesta over the past four-and-a-half billion years.
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Read the rest of Ancient Impacts Stained Vesta with Carbon-Rich Material (437 words)
© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2013. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: asteroid, dawn, Max Planck, meteorite, NASA, organics, protoplanet, Solar System, vesta
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2013-01-04 00:00:57
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/99273/ancient-impacts-stained-vesta-with-carbon-rich-material/
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