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In the Solar System

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

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