Tracing Lutetia’s grooves

A portion of asteroid Lutetia, looking into the 55 km-wide Massilia crater (red circular outline) with the North Pole Crater Cluster (NPCC) in the distance (purple outline). The grooves (or ‘lineaments’) are coloured according to the crater to which they are associated, i.e. red for Massilia and purple for NPCC. The blue lineaments are associated with the ‘Suspicio’ crater, while the yellow lineaments are not associated with any crater discussed in this study.

Lutetia was imaged in July 2010 by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, while en route to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta took images of the 100 km-wide asteroid for about two hours during the flyby. At its closest approach, Rosetta was 3162km from Lutetia. In the image shown here, north is up.