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2867 Šteins
Details
Šteins is a small E-type asteroid in the main belt, shaped like a cut diamond. ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft flew past it in 2008 and revealed a body topped by a surprisingly large impact crater.
2867 Šteins is a small asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. On 5 September 2008, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft passed within about 800 kilometres of it on the way to its comet, and the OSIRIS camera captured this view of a world that looks unmistakably like a cut diamond hanging in space.
Šteins is an E-type asteroid, its surface dominated by bright, iron-poor silicate minerals that mark it as a fragment heated and reworked early in the Solar System’s history. It measures only about 6.8 kilometres across its longest axis and spins once every six hours. Capping its narrow end is a crater roughly 2 kilometres wide — so large that scientists were surprised such a small body survived the impact intact.
A chain of smaller craters running down from that giant scar hints at how the asteroid responded to the shock, with material settling and slumping across its surface. As one of the first asteroids studied at close range by a European probe, Šteins offered an early, detailed look at the battered building blocks left over from the planets’ formation.
2.98km
Visual creditESA/OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGOSource: Wikimedia Commons
Key facts
- Category
- Asteroids
- Object class
- E-type main-belt asteroid
- Scale fact
- 6.83 kmmaximum extent
- Composition
- Iron-poor silicate rock
Scale context
Where 2867 Šteins sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, 2867 Šteins sits between 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and 9P/Tempel 1. The band below uses nearby Asteroids objects for context.
Shared physical scale
26.0km
Together, these objects make the size change around 2867 Šteins easy to compare at a glance.
Sources
References for 2867 Šteins
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- 2867 Šteins — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (ESA/OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
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Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.