# Pallas

*In the Solar System*

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 | 430,534,685 km (-338,548 km/d) |
| From the Earth | 304,003,813 km (-1,474,336 km/d) |
| A signal takes | 17 min |

Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of 2026-09-05, changing at the rate given beside each. The interpolation itself is good to a few kilometres; what ages these figures is the date, not the arithmetic.

## Elsewhere

- On the live map: https://www.orbitalmap.space/?world=solar-system&focus=pallas
- This object as a page: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/pallas/
- Every object: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/
- What this site is and what it reads: https://www.orbitalmap.space/llms.txt