About where the images come from, don't forget that there are two cameras on Dawn: -- Framing Camera (FC) which is high-resolution and has a 7-position filter

About where the images come from, don't forget that there are two cameras on Dawn: -- Framing Camera (FC) which is high-resolution and has a 7-position filter wheel (which allows for specific wavelengths to be chosen) as well as allowing white-light images. FC is used for navigation and general mapping of the asteroid geometry. -- A Visible and Infrared Spectrometer (VIR) which is lower resolution, but better calibrated radiometrically. It produces spectrally-resolved images to determine mineral composition. More at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/science_payload.asp http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/science_payload.asp The images you're seeing in this press release seem to be from FC. I say this because they have high resolution, and some other press releases with similar images say outright that they used FC. The FC spec is 94 micro radians/pixel which, at a distance of 4400 km, works out to be about 410 meters per pixel, and that seems compatible with the feature sizes of ~10km noted in the press release. But, some of the images in the wikipedia page you linked, which is very good, are in infrared, and are of lower resolution, and probably therefore come from VIR. The temperature plot also seems like VIR (you can get a temperature if you have a spectrum). Finally, about processing, I notice that the images in the press release seem to have a lot of pixels. This is a clue that they might have composited a lot of individual images to get this one image. If so, there had to be a geometric correction (at the very least) because of course the camera is in motion while the images are taken. This requires very good geometry information. Additionally, there might have been a projection into a standard coordinate system (so that "north" is up). You might be interested to know that there is controversy about asteroid coordinate systems (for Vesta, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta#Coordinate_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta#Coordinate_systems). About the white areas -- yes, probably they saturated the detector.