# Vesta

*In the Solar System*

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 × |
| From the Sun | 364,253,521 km (+137,369 km/d) |
| From the Earth | 241,683,109 km (-1,110,998 km/d) |
| A signal takes | 13 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=vesta
- This object as a page: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/vesta/
- Every object: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/
- What this site is and what it reads: https://www.orbitalmap.space/llms.txt