Despite being only about 330 miles across , the asteroid Vesta features some of the biggest cliff in the intact solar system . This novel image from NASA ’s Dawn probe gives us one of the most striking looks yet at Vesta ’s drop .
The cliff seen at the center of the trope is about twelve international mile high . That ’s more than twice the height of Mount Everest , but these cliff are just on the secondly large object in the solar organization , not Earth . On our satellite , a proportionally large cliff would be near 300 miles mellow . The precise origins of these cliffs are n’t known for certain , but a NASA stargazer explains one dramatic possibility :
Pictured above near the icon centre is a very mysterious drop running about 20 kilometers from top to bottom . The persona was need by the robotlike Dawn spacecraft that began orbiting the 500 - kilometer space rock earlier this year . The topography of the scarp and its environment bespeak that huge landslide may have occurred down this slope . The scarp ’s lineage remains unknown , but part of the cliff face itself must be quite old as several craters have appeared in it since it was create .
This figure of speech was get by NASA ’s Dawn space vehicle as part of its high altitude mapping survey of the asteroid , and the next footprint for the investigation will be to spiral down to a miserable field to measure Vesta ’s gravitational field . After that , Dawn will begin its recollective journeying towards the large objective in the asteroid bang , not to mention its only dwarf satellite , Ceres .
ViaNASA .
AstronomyDawnNASAScience
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