The Dawn mission is on its way to the asteroid belt, and is on course to rendezvous with its first target, Vesta, in February 2011. As a part of that journey, Dawn received a gravity assist from Mars as it flew past the planet on February 17, 2009. During its closest approach, framing camera images were snapped of Mars' surface near the terminator at daybreak. This image is centered at about 48° N, 82°W, in northwest Tempe Terra, and straddles the boundary between the southern highlands (lower right portion of image), and the northern lowland (upper left portion) terrains of Mars. The depression on the left side of the image is a tectonic feature called a graben, formed by crustal extension. The width of the image is about 55 kilometers. Illumination is from the left.

The Dawn framing camera was built by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, in partnership with the Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt and Institut fuer Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze. The Dawn mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The Planetary Science Institute manages Dawn's Gamma-Ray and Neutron Detector (PI, Tom Prettyman), which will map the elemental composition of the surfaces of Vesta and Ceres to determine how they formed and evolved.