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TOPIC: Vesta
Blobrana


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RE: Vesta
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IT Came From Vesta
Their infiltration began - like so many other infiltrations - with a tell-tale contrail of smoke and flame creating a supersonic slash across the afternoon sky. But this time they would not go unnoticed. This time, two Australian station workers, just going about their job, opening a gate to a boundary fence, witnessed their arrival. The eyewitnesses later said they observed a "fireball with sparks coming off," streaking from the south to the north, make its descent into a hummock of spinifex grass. It would be another 10 years before they told their story. A decade before the world realised -- the Eucrites had arrived.

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Blobrana


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Date       UT      R.A. (J2000) Decl.    Delta     r     El.    Ph.   V      

2007 09 18 000000 17 03 29.3 -22 50 57   2.067   2.175   82.4  27.3   7.4       
2007 09 19 000000 17 05 05.4 -22 55 34   2.079   2.176   81.8  27.2   7.5      
2007 09 20 000000 17 06 42.3 -23 00 06   2.091   2.176   81.2  27.1   7.5      
2007 09 21 000000 17 08 20.1 -23 04 34   2.102   2.177   80.6  27.1   7.5      
2007 09 22 000000 17 09 58.7 -23 08 57   2.114   2.177   80.0  27.0   7.5       
2007 09 23 000000 17 11 38.2 -23 13 16   2.126   2.178   79.4  26.9   7.5     
2007 09 24 000000 17 13 18.5 -23 17 30   2.138   2.178   78.8  26.9   7.5    
2007 09 25 000000 17 14 59.6 -23 21 39   2.150   2.179   78.2  26.8   7.5     
2007 09 26 000000 17 16 41.4 -23 25 44   2.162   2.179   77.6  26.7   7.5        
2007 09 27 000000 17 18 24.1 -23 29 43   2.173   2.180   77.1  26.6   7.5     
2007 09 28 000000 17 20 07.4 -23 33 38   2.185   2.181   76.5  26.5   7.6       
2007 09 29 000000 17 21 51.6 -23 37 27   2.197   2.181   75.9  26.5   7.6       
2007 09 30 000000 17 23 36.4 -23 41 12   2.209   2.182   75.3  26.4   7.6



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Blobrana


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Melted Crumbs from Asteroid Vesta
Micrometeorite bombardment accounts for almost 30,000 tons of material entering Earth's atmosphere each year. Though most of the material evaporates during entry or is lost to sea or falls on the land unnoticed, thousands of micrometeorites have been collected successfully from deep-sea sediments and from the snow and ice of the polar caps. Susan Taylor (Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory) and colleagues collected micrometeorites with an ingeniously designed robot from a decidedly out-of-the-way place: Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station water well. She and Greg Herzog and Jeremy Delaney (Rutgers University) selected 10 out of thousands of these extraterrestrial particles, 75 to 700 micrometers in size, because of their unusual shapes and mineralogy, and measured the Fe/Mn and Fe/Mg elemental ratios, which are known to help constrain the type and source of meteorites. The results show that nine of the cosmic spherules are broadly chondritic in composition as expected. However, one, along with six others re-examined from a previous study, are atypical with nonchondritic compositions. Taylor and co-authors propose an origin from an achondrite, Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite (HED)-like parent body such as asteroid Vesta. HED-like objects account for about 6% of all meteorites, and only about 0.5% of all micrometeorites perhaps because of a natural mechanical toughness that would resist break-up and fragmentation.

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Blobrana


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(4) Vesta
Orbital Elements

Date    TT    R. A. (2000) Decl.     Delta      r     Elong.  Phase     V
2007 08 04    16 10.92   -18 36.7    1.548    2.158   113.1    25.6     6.8
2007 08 09    16 14.47   -19 06.9    1.602    2.159   109.2    26.3     6.9
2007 08 14    16 18.69   -19 37.2    1.657    2.161   105.5    26.9     6.9
2007 08 19    16 23.54   -20 07.3    1.714    2.162   101.9    27.3     7.0
2007 08 24    16 28.97   -20 37.1    1.771    2.164    98.4    27.5     7.1
2007 08 29    16 34.94   -21 06.1    1.830    2.166    95.0    27.7     7.2


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Blobrana


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Vesta was the fourth Minor Planet or Asteroid to be discovered, being first observed as a minor planet in 1807 by H W Olbers at Bremen. Because of its opposition brightness, it must, of course have been seen naked eye many times before that, although as a faint star.

vesta

Vesta reflects 25 percent of the sunlight falling onto its surface, the Moon, by comparison, reflects only 12 percent. Vesta shows a rotational peroid of 5.342 hours.

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Vesta was imaged with the Keck II Telescope with Keck Adaptive Optics system on its second night of operation.

Vesta Keck II Images in three bands (J=1.25 microns, H=1.65 microns and K' = 2.1 microns) were used to produce a true colour image. The open loop (no AO correction) image is shown in the lower right hand side. The top row of images shows the results of deconvolution (i.e. the estimate of the object which, when convolved by the PSF - shown in the inset - most accurately reproduces the data). In the true color image, red represents K; green, H; and blue, J. The albedo at 1.2 microns is dominated by the reflection of pyroxene while at 2.1 mostly by that of olivine. Thus a very blue area shows a concentration of surface pyroxene, and red, a concentration of olivine.

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Blobrana


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Asteroid Vesta April 19, 1995
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vesta
The Hubble telescope resolved features down to 50 miles across, and revealed a surprisingly diverse world with an exposed mantle, ancient lava flows and impact basins. Though only 525 kilometres across, it once had a molten interior. This contradicts conventional ideas that asteroids essentially are cold, rocky fragments left behind from the early days of planetary formation.


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Blobrana


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Vesta Surface Map
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vesta map
These two maps are derived from images of asteroid 4 Vesta taken between November 28 and December 1, 1994, by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Blobrana


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spacer.gif Vesta Meteorite

Vesta Meteorite

Planetary astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a giant crater on Vesta. The crater is about 460 km across and about 13 km deep.
The crater was caused by a large impact, which would have ejected smaller parts of the asteroids
The asteroid had been linked to a class of small asteroids and meteorites that appeared to be compositionally similar to Vesta that shows the unique spectral signature of the mineral pyroxene.

This meteorite is maybe a part of the crust. The meteorite is composed of the mineral pyroxene, common in lava flows. The meteorite's chemical identity points to the asteroid as its source.
The meteorite's mineral grain structure also indicates it was once molten.


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Blobrana


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"Zircons on Earth and in space have basically the same characteristics. They occur when boiling rock crystallises and turns into solid form primary crystallisation products or they could be secondary products caused by heating from impacts. We know Vesta became inactive within first 10 million years of solar system formation which is nearly 4.5 billion years ago. This provides a snapshot of the early solar system and clues to the early evolution of Earth's mantle and core" - Professor Gopalan Srinivasan of University of Toronto's Department of Geology

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