Vesta Fiesta!

Asteroid Vesta was discovered on March 29, 1807 by German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers [1]. Vesta is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. How large is it? 530 kilometers wide. How far is it? 211 million kilometers (131 million miles) from Earth when Hubble observed it [2]. For the first time since its discovery 204 years ago, we are able to see it so clearly via Dawn mission. Here is an image from July 9th, 2011 observation of Vesta from Dawn [3]:

It took Dawn four years to get to Vesta, on a slow and steady approach [2,5]. Dawn will enter Vesta's orbit on July 15, 2011 [4] (July 16th EST) and stays there for about a year to study this asteroid. Then, it will leave Vesta's orbit for its next destination Ceres, a dwarf planet. Ceres is in the same class of celestial bodies as Pluto! Most people note that Pluto got demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet because of the discovery of two of its moons, Nix and Hydra. However, this new classification implies to astronomers and planetary scientists that so many other celestial bodies, such as Ceres, got promoted to the same class as Pluto! Whether or not Vesta has moons, will also imply different things about our solar system and creation. Stay tuned!


[1] http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/29mar_vesta/
[2] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/pia13428.html
[3] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/dawn-image-070911.html
[4] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/news/dawn20110714.html
[5] http://dawn.ucla.edu/dawn/mission.html