Asteroid Vesta comes into focus (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

The Dawn spacecraft is starting to get an eye-full of the Vesta asteroid.

The probe expects to reach the 530km-wide body in late July, whereupon it will go into orbit around the rock.

Vesta is what scientists term a protoplanet - a body that never acquired the proportions of "grown-up" planets such as Earth and Mars.

It is nonetheless an impressive object - the second most massive asteroid in the belt of rocky debris that orbits between Mars and Jupiter.

Nasa's (US space agency) Dawn satellite will be spending about 12 months at Vesta before moving on to Ceres which, at 950km in diameter, is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt.



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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13754423
video: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/