Dawn creeps closer to Clanger homeworld Vesta NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned another fine snap of Clanger homeworld Vesta – the substantial asteroid belt object seen here on 23 July from a distance of around 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometres): Dawn image of Vesta's dark side. Pic: NASA NASA elaborates: "Dawn took this image over Vesta's northern hemisphere after the …
ie a clanger-related comment...
The ridges are almost certainly a result of too much soup being extracted from the source - thus causing a catastrophic collapsing of the moons surface.
I suspect that an investigation needs to be launched into the soup dragons effectiveness, since surely she can't be doing her job properly.
And for those determined to be stick-in-the-muds about it I would imagine it's caused by gravitational tides, impacts or having been broken off the earth/ moon when the asteroid belt came into being.
ttfn
Well a good theory for the whole-body-sized ridge on Iapetus, moon of Saturn, supposes that an impact threw a lot of material into orbit around the moon which soon formed a ring that gradually rained back down to the surface. Maybe repeated instances like that for a smaller body like Vesta could explain a) the ridges, b) the fact they are more or less aligned. I suppose we'd need to know something about the body's rotational axis to make a better guess.
The ridges and striations I'm seeing in the Vesta images are rather similar to the features seen on Mars' moon Phobos:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/marsexpress/115-051004-0756-6-co-02-Phobos_hires.jpg
...where the ridges/fractures seem to be mostly near the huge impact feature at the left in this image. It's believed that the force of the impact that created that large crater also created the network of stress fractures in the crust.
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