Analyzing avalanches on asteroid Vesta offers new method for understanding regolith processes

A study at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris utilizes images from NASA’s Dawn mission and a Bayesian inversion of the Hapke photometric model to examine avalanches and ejecta deposits on the asteroid Vesta. The findings indicate that the brightest deposits are linked to the most recently mobilized surfaces, providing a new method for tracking regolith evolution on airless bodies, and the paper is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A study conducted at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris uses images from NASA’s Dawn mission and a Bayesian inversion of the Hapke photometric model to analyze avalanches and ejecta deposits on the asteroid Vesta. The results show that the brightest deposits correspond to the most recently mobilized surfaces, offering a new way to track the evolution of regolith on airless bodies. The paper is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.