NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained these images with its visible and infrared instrument on July 23, 2011. The two images represent the same zone of the giant asteroid Vesta with an image resolution of 1.3 kilometers per pixel.
The top image is a simulated true-color picture of the asteroid's surface to show what it would like to the human eye. The image was produced by assigning visible-light colors (blue, green and red) to three visible and infrared channels (440, 550 and 700 nanometers).
In the bottom image, visible and infrared channels have again been assigned visible-light colors. But in this case, the colors were chosen to enhance the differences in the composition of the asteroid surface and, therefore, in the geologic processes that must have created them.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/ASI/INAF/IASF/IFSI
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