In the Solar System · tracked live
Pallas
The third-largest asteroid, here for its size, and the odd one out among the big ones: its orbit is tilted 35° to everything else in the belt, which puts it out of reach of any spacecraft that has been going that way, and nothing has been near it. What is known comes from the VLT's adaptive optics, which resolve it into a dented ball - the craters cover it more heavily than they do Ceres or Vesta, presumably because that steep orbit means it meets the rest of the belt at high speed.
- Radius
- 256 km
- Around the equator
- 1,605 km
- Mass
- 2.04 x 10^20 kg
- Compared with the Earth
- 0 ×
- From the Sun
- 417,554,942 km (-353,946 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 276,390,786 km (+97,810 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 15 min
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.