Vesta Gravity Model v3

Version 3 of the Guild's Vesta gravity model is the most detailed picture yet of what lies inside the second-largest body in the Belt. It combines 1,900 hours of Gravwell Gradiometer Array data, flown from Valkyrie Survey Corvettes in low Vesta orbit, into a single consistent model reaching 12 kilometres into the crust.

The core product is a Bouguer gravity grid at 250-metre resolution, corrected for topography so that buried density changes stand out. Liang Qiao's team also inverts the grid into 3D density contrast volumes and publishes a list of 84 metal-body candidates, buried blobs dense enough to be meteoritic iron. The Cinder Tor Iridium Lode was the first candidate from version 2 to be drilled.

The release is CC-BY-4.0: use it for anything, commercial or not, as long as you credit Ferrovane Prospecting Guild. The repository includes the inversion code, uncertainty grids and a notebook showing how to extract a profile across any crater.

Version 4, due in 2188, will add new passes over the north pole and the Rheasilvia central peak.