image: A perspective view of Marcia crater, Vesta. Marcia (70 km in diameter) is one of the youngest large craters on Vesta and host to the largest concentration of pits on the asteroid. On the left, a mosaic of Dawn framing camera images is shown overlain on a digital terrain model with five times vertical exaggeration. A detail view of Marcia’s floor and pitted terrain is seen on the right. The pitted terrain is thought to form through degassing of volatile-bearing material on the surface heated by the impact event. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the September 20, 2012, issue of Science Express, published by AAAS. The paper, by Brett Denevi at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and colleagues was titled, "Pitted Terrain on Vesta and Implications for the Presence of Volatiles." view more
Credit: Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/JHUAPL