Links
- Wikipedia
- Vesta on Wikipedia
Vesta
Details
Vesta is one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt and was mapped in detail by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Unlike most asteroids, it separated into crust, mantle, and core early in Solar System history, making it a surviving protoplanetary world rather than a simple leftover rock.
Vesta matters because it complicates the word asteroid. It sits in the main belt, but NASA describes it as a body that separated into crust, mantle, and core early in Solar System history. That makes it less like an ordinary fragment and more like a small surviving protoplanet, a world that began down a planetary path without becoming a full planet.
Dawn made that distinction physical. The spacecraft mapped Vesta's surface and gravity field, showing a battered body with enormous impact scars and internal structure. The Rheasilvia basin is so large relative to Vesta that the collision removed material from a major fraction of the world and probably helped create the Vesta family of asteroids.
That is why Vesta belongs on this scale. It shows that the asteroid belt is not only a collection of small leftover rocks. Some objects there preserve the interrupted history of planet building, with interiors, crustal material, and impact debris that still connect spacecraft observations to meteorites found on Earth.
229km
Key facts
- Category
- Asteroids
- Object class
- Differentiated protoplanetary asteroid
- Mass
- ~0.000043 Earth masses
- Host
- Sun
- Scale fact
- 525 kmmean diameter
- Estimated age
- ~4.56 billion years
- Composition
- Basaltic crust, rocky mantle, nickel-iron core
Scale context
Where Vesta sits on the full axis
Together, these objects make the size change around Vesta easy to compare at a glance.
Sources
References for Vesta
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.
- Vesta — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (NASA / JPL / MPS / DLR / IDA / Björn Jónsson, Public domain)
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
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.