Introduction

My name is Noelle, and I am a senior this year at BASIS Flagstaff. I am doing my Senior Research Project on the asteroid Vesta. I will be mapping the Platinum Group Metal (PGM) content on Vesta with the mapping software Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS). Once I have mapped the PGMs I will be able to determine if it is viable to move mining for PGMs to asteroids, specifically Vesta.

We picked Vesta because it has the best surface for potential mining. We were originally going to use Ceres, but realized its surface has been changed and the marker minerals we would need to determine if there are PGMs are in the center of the dwarf planet. This is not optimal, so we decided Vesta would be a better subject because the marker minerals are on the surface. Vesta is one of the largest asteroids in the asteroid belt. Its mean diameter is 525 kilometers. Vesta's official name is "4 Vesta" because it was the fourth asteroid discovered.

My advisor for this project is Dr. Moses Milazzo. He works in the Astrogeology Department at USGS in Flagstaff. He will be advising me and helping me use the mapping software and providing me with the data from NASA's Dawn mission.

I am also going to present my findings on Vesta at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston at the end of March. I will be doing a poster presentation. This is an amazing opportunity I was given to present with college students, and I am very excited!

I will be going to the USGS Astrogeology Science Center for my volunteering. The link to USGS is:  https://astrogeology.usgs.gov