Donald Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC April 19, 1995

(Phone: 202/358-1547) EMBARGOED UNTIL: 2:00 PM EDT

Tammy Jones
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-5566)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute
(Phone: 410/338-4514)

RELEASE: 95-52

NASA'S HUBBLE TELESCOPE MAPS THE ANCIENT SURFACE OF VESTA

Hubble Space Telescope images of the asteroid Vesta are providing

astronomers with a glimpse of the oldest terrain ever seen in the solar
system and a peek into a broken-off section of the "mini-planet" that
exposes its interior.

Hubble's pictures provide the best view yet of Vesta's complex

surface, with a geology similar to that of terrestrial worlds such as
Earth or Mars. The asteroid's ancient surface, battered by collisions
eons ago, allows astronomers to peer below the asteroid's crust and into
the past.

Astronomers also believe that fragments gouged out of Vesta

during ancient collisions have fallen to Earth as meteorites, making
Vesta only the fourth solar system object, other than Earth, the Moon
and Mars, where scientists have a confirmed laboratory sample. (About
50-60 other meteorite types are suspected to have come from asteroids,
but positive identifications are more difficult to make.)

"The Hubble observations show that Vesta is far more interesting

than simply a chunk of rock in space as most asteroids are," said Ben
Zellner of Georgia Southern University. "This qualifies Vesta as the
'sixth' terrestrial planet."

No bigger than the state of Arizona, Vesta offers new clues to

the origin of the solar system and the interior makeup of the rocky
planets. "Vesta has survived essentially intact since the formation of
the planets," Zellner said. "It provides a record of the long and
complex evolution of our solar system."

Resolving features down to 50 miles across, Hubble reveals a

surprisingly diverse world with an exposed mantle, ancient lava flows
and impact basins. Though only 325 miles (525 kilometers) 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.

Besides providing scientists with direct samples, Vesta's chipped

surface allows Hubble to study the asteroid's rocky mantle, giving
scientists a unique opportunity to see what a planet looks like below
the crust. "Our knowledge of the interior composition of the other
terrestrial worlds, the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury and even Earth,
depends heavily on theory and inference," Zellner said. "Vesta allows
us to actually see the mantle and study pristine samples in our
laboratories."

Before these observations, only the smaller and less geologically

diverse asteroids, Ida and Gaspra, have been observed in detail by the
Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft. Unlike Vesta, these smaller objects
are pieces torn off larger bodies by collisions that occurred perhaps
only a few hundred million years ago.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the

Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA) for
NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt,
MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international
cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

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NOTE TO EDITORS: Images and a video depicting Vesta rotating

are available to media representatives by calling NASA's Broadcast and
Imaging Branch at 202/358-1900. NASA photo numbers are:
Color: B&W:
Vesta 24 frames: 95-HC-187 95-H-191
Vesta Meteorite: 95-HC-188 95-H-192

Image files in GIF and JPEG format may be accessed on Internet

via anonymous ftp from ftp.stsci.edu in /pubinfo:
GIF JPEG
Vesta 24 frames: /pubinfo/gif/Vesta24.gif /pubinfo/jpeg/Vesta24.jpg
Vesta Meteorite: /pubinfo/gif/VestMet.gif /pubinfo/jpeg/VestMet.jpg

The same images are available via World Wide Web from links in
URL http://www.stsci.edu/public.html, or more directly from
http://www.stsci.edu/Latest.html

A science backgrounder entitled "Asteroid or Mini-Planet? Hubble

Maps the Ancient Surface of Vesta" is available in the Headquarters
Newsroom at 202/358-1600.

SCIENCE BACKGROUND
ASTEROID OR MINI-PLANET?
NASA'S HUBBLE TELESCOPE MAPS THE ANCIENT SURFACE OF VESTA

VESTA: THE SIXTH TERRESTRIAL PLANET?

Vesta is the most geologically diverse of the large asteroids and

the only known one with distinctive light and dark areas -- much like
the face of our Moon. Previous ground-based spectroscopy of Vesta
indicates regions that are basaltic, which means lava flows once
occurred on its surface. This is surprising evidence that the asteroid
once had a molten interior, like Earth does.

One possibility is that Vesta agglomerated from smaller material

that includes radioactive debris (such as the the isotope Aluminum-26)
that was incorporated into the core. This radioactive "shrapnel"
probably came from a nearby supernova explosion. (In fact a supernova
might have triggered the birth of our solar system.) This hot isotope
may have melted the core, causing the asteroid to differentiate:
heavier, dense material sank to the center while lighter rock rose to
the surface. This is a common structure for the terrestrial planets.
After Vesta's formation, molten rock flowed onto the asteroid's surface.
This happened more than four billion years ago. The surface has
remained unchanged since then, except for occasional meteoroid impacts.

One or more large impacts tore away some of the crust exposing a
deeper mantle of olivine, which is believed to constitute most of the
Earth's mantle. Some of the pieces knocked off Vesta have fallen to
Earth as meteorites, which show a similar spectral fingerprint to
Vesta's surface composition.

A PIECE OF VESTA FALLS TO EARTH

In October 1960, two fence workers in Millbillillie, Western

Australia, observed a fireball heading toward the ground, and pieces of
the fallen meteorite were found ten years later. The fragments stood
out from the area's reddish sandy soil because they had a shiny black
fusion crust, produced by their fiery entry through Earth's atmosphere.

Unlike most other meteorites, this sample can be traced to its

parent body, the asteroid Vesta. The meteorite's chemical identity
points to Vesta because it has the same unique pyroxene spectral
signature. Pyroxine is common in lava flows, meaning that the
meteorite was created in an ancient lava flow on Vesta's surface. The
structure of the meteorite's mineral grains also indicates it was molten
and then cooled. The isotopes (oxygen atoms with varying number of
neutrons) in the specimen are unlike the isotopes found for all other
rocks of the Earth, Moon and most other meteorites.

The meteorite also has the same pyroxene signature as other small
asteroids, recently discovered near Vesta, that are considered chips
blasted off Vesta's surface. This debris extends all the way to an
escape hatch region in the asteroid belt called the Kirkwood gap. This
region is swept free of asteroids because Jupiter's gravitational pull
removes material from the main belt and hurls it onto a new orbit that
crosses Earth's path around the Sun.

The Australian meteorite probably followed this route to Earth.

It was torn off Vesta's surface as part of a larger fragment. Other
collisions broke apart the parent fragment and threw pieces toward the
Kirkwood gap, and onto a collision course toward Earth. Meteorites
found in other locations on Earth are probably from Vesta too.

THE OBSERVATION

Ben Zellner (Georgia Southern University), Alex Storrs (Space

Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD), Ed Wells (Computer Sciences
Corporation, Bethesda, MD), Rudi Albrecht (European Southern Observatory
in Garching bei Munich, Germany) and collaborators used Hubble's Wide
Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC 2) to collect images of Vesta in four
colors of light between November 28 and December 1, 1994. At the time,
Vesta was 156 million miles (252 million km) from Earth. In late
December 1994, when Vesta was 10 million miles (16 million km) closer to
Earth than a month earlier, HST's Faint Object Camera made even higher
resolution images. These results are complemented by infrared
observations made on December 11, by Olivier Hainaut and colleagues with
an adaptive-optics camera on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-
meter telescope in Chile. By combining Hubble and ESO observations,
astronomers will be able to produce a geochemical map of an asteroid's
surface.

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