Vesta
A rocky record of the past
Vesta is one of the largest asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids are smaller objects left from the time when the Solar System formed. They travel around the Sun, and many are in the main asteroid belt. Huge gaps separate them: this is not a tightly packed pile of rocks that spacecraft must constantly dodge.
Vesta has an uneven shape and an ancient rocky surface. It has craters and a huge collision mark near its south pole. Dawn studied it from orbit. Some pieces of Vesta eventually reached Earth as meteorites. By examining these stones in laboratories, scientists read clues about a distant asteroid’s history.
Play space games → Explore in the planetarium →In the planetarium you can spin this world and look at it from every side.
Artist’s impression · the surface is an illustration.
Sources and images
Celestial maps: Solar System Scope / INOVE · CC BY 4.0. Thumbnails were reduced and shaded. Artistic SVG maps were created for this project.