The NASA Dawn mission has extensively examined the surface of asteroid Vesta,
the second most massive body in the main belt. The high quality of the gathered
data provides us with an unique opportunity to determine the surface and
internal properties of one of the most important and intriguing main belt
asteroids (MBAs). In this paper, we focus on the size frequency distributions
(SFDs) of sub-kilometer impact craters observed at high spatial resolution on
several selected young terrains on Vesta. These small crater populations offer
an excellent opportunity to determine the nature of their asteroidal precursors
(namely MBAs) at sizes that are not directly observable from ground-based
telescopes (i.e., below ~100 m diameter). Moreover, unlike many other MBA
surfaces observed by spacecraft thus far, the young terrains examined had
crater spatial densities that were far from empirical saturation. Overall, we
find that the cumulative power-law index (slope) of small crater SFDs on Vesta
is fairly consistent with predictions derived from current collisional and
dynamical models down to a projectile size of ~10 m diameter (Bottke et al.,
2005a,b). The shape of the impactor SFD for small projectile sizes does not
appear to have changed over the last several billions of years, and an argument
can be made that the absolute number of small MBAs has remained roughly
constant (within a factor of 2) over the same time period. The apparent steady
state nature of the main belt population potentially provides us with a set of
intriguing constraints that can be used to glean insights into the physical
evolution of individual MBAs as well as the main belt as an ensemble.Comment: Accepted by PSS, to appear on Vesta cratering special issu