Vesta is a huge asteroid and the Dawn spacecraft has been sent back in 2007 in a mission to gather as much information on the huge rock as possible

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Vesta is a huge asteroid and the Dawn spacecraft has been sent back in 2007 in a mission to gather as much information on the huge rock as possible

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has sent home the first pictures of the huge asteroid Vesta so the world could see the beauty.
Just a couple of days before entering the orbit around the far-away space rock, NASA’s spacecraft, Dawn, sent the first pictures of the massive asteroid. According to the scientists, these first snapshots show the asteroid in great detail, as it has never been seen before. For 200 years, the researchers have analyzed the huge space rock, using different methods, but they had never seen it in so much detail up until now, the researchers admitted. “We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system,” said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell, of UCLA.
According to Russell, this particular region of the Universe has been ignored up until recently and the new snapshots provided by the Dawn allow scientists to get a good insight on the history of the huge space rock. Furthermore, it seems that they can also determine the complex transformation the asteroid went through throughout time. Vesta is about 530 kilometers wide and according to the researchers, it is the second largest object that can be found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Given that it is such a large rock, scientists went as far as to name it a protoplanet. Dawn was the first spacecraft ever to enter the orbit around an object in the asteroid belt and it is planning to stay there during the next year, in order to make investigations. These observations are made in order to help researchers better understand the solar system and hopefully, to also understand how these huge rocks have formed and what contributed to many of their changes in time.

Vesta is a huge asteroid between Mars and Jupiter and it is about 520 kilometers wide

As soon as Dawn begins gathering important data, more pictures are to be provided to NASA and probably to the whole world, so as to make us all awe and wonder at the beauty and immensity of the Universe. Dawn was launched back in September 2007 and its budget is of about $466 million. Furthermore, it seems that the spacecraft will launch for the biggest object in the asteroid belt, called Ceres, sometime in 2012 and will land there in 2015. The intent is to make the same research there as on Vesta and provide information and pictures of the largest object in the asteroid belt. That must happen because the two objects have totally different characteristics. Ceres is thought to be more primitive and wet, in comparison to Vesta, which is a lot drier and rockier.
According to the researchers, the insight this mission provides is about how these objects formed and what transformation they went through from the formation of the solar system. In an attempt to better understand the solar system, the scientists have begun gathering data in order to help them accomplish their goals. Furthermore, it seems that this mission is also going to provide some valuable information on how the Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus were formed.

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