Dawn LAMO Image 51

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Caption:

This image, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows the southeastern rim of Occator Crater. This 57-mile- (92-kilometer-) wide crater is of high interest because of its bright spots, which are not pictured here.

Compacted material forms spurs along the crater wall. A group of roughly parallel, braided fractures can be seen on the crater floor at top center. Additional fractures, more muted in their appearance, are visible near upper right and lower left. The crater's ejecta blanket, which spreads away from the rim toward lower right, is peppered mostly with very small-scale impact craters.

The Dawn spacecraft took this image on Jan. 26, 2016, from its low-altitude mapping orbit, at a distance of about 240 miles (385 kilometers) from the surface. The image resolution is 120 feet (35 meters) per pixel.

Background Info:

Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgments, see http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission .

For more information about the Dawn mission, visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

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