New images of Vesta slated to be released on Monday

F*&king finally. I found out today that thankfully I'm not the only one that is intensely irritated by Dawn's team taking navigational photos every week and not bothering to let anyone see them. There is even a small movement of people who are liking Dawn's framing camera on Facebook and commenting on the page in order to show them that yes, people do care and are waiting with much anticipation for the images to be released. This will be important in the runup to Dawn's second target too - the much larger Ceres, which will be visible from a greater distance.

For more on this, see this article from the Planetary Society and Unmanned Spaceflight's forum thread:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003054/

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=6957&st=150

It really is a mistake to avoid releasing new images on the assumption that "there's nothing to see there, you probably won't be excited about it anyway". There is no sense of joint exploration or common purpose if we are told to sit down and wait until they have something they deem worthy to show.