Observations of Vesta with HST-Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in 2007

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Scientific paper

Hubble Space Telescope Observations of asteroid 4 Vesta were acquired on May 14 and 16, 2007 through one complete Vesta rotation to map the southern hemisphere in 4 filters (439, 673, 953, 1042 nm), interpret mineral composition, improve knowledge of spin, pole and shape and search for satellites supporting NASA's Dawn mission. Fits to limb profiles are close to previously measured semi-axes of 289, 280, 229 km (Thomas et al. 1997), and are consistent with occultations (Dunham et al. 1989, 1991) and AO solutions by Drummond. A spin pole solution from control points RA=304 deg Dec=42 deg +/-5 deg in agreement with previous determinations. There is no need to modify the spin rate or equation for the prime meridian prior to acquiring high resolution Dawn data. Deconvolution using Maximum Entropy Modeling was carried followed by contrast enhanced, color composite images from which a rotation animation was made. The brightness distribution changes as the asteroid rotates indicating global scale features that will only come into verifiable geological context upon Dawn's orbiting Vesta in 2011. They are nevertheless tantalizing. Eight 40 s exposures were taken to search for satellites. No satellites were found to the limiting visual magnitude of 26. With Vesta's albedo of 0.42 the photometric diameter would be 5.5 km. However, the limiting magnitude varies with image quadrant, so in some quadrants the detection limit is 30km. We searched between 5600 km above Vesta's surface out to 786,000 km. We searched approximately 55% of Vesta's Hill radius which is 493 Vesta radii.

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