In the Solar System · tracked live
Vesta
The second-largest body in the asteroid belt and the brightest - at a good opposition it is just visible without a telescope, the only asteroid that ever is. It is here for its size, and it is not really a rock: it melted early and separated into crust, mantle and iron core, which makes it a planet that stopped growing. Dawn orbited it for fourteen months in 2011 and 2012 and found a basin 500 km wide at the south pole, most of the way across the whole body; the material it threw out is still arriving here as meteorites, about one in twenty of all the ones that fall.
- Radius
- 263 km
- Around the equator
- 1,651 km
- Mass
- 2.59 x 10^20 kg
- Compared with the Earth
- 0 ×
- Turns once in
- 5 h 21 m
- From the Sun
- 369,184,304 km (+124,993 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 221,826,920 km (+190,032 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 12 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.