Vesta is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, with a mean diameter of 525 kilometres (326 mi). It was discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers on 29 March 1807 and is named after Vesta, the virgin goddess of home and hearth from Roman mythology.
True color image of Vesta taken by Dawn. The massive Rheasilvia Crater dominates Vesta's south pole.
Vesta, Ceres, and the Moon with sizes shown to scale
SPHERE image is shown on the left, with a synthetic view derived from Dawn images shown on the right for comparison.
Claudia crater (indicated by the arrow at the bottom of the closeup image at right) defines the prime meridian in the Dawn/NASA coordinate system.
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. The identified objects are of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, and, on average, are about one million kilometers apart. This asteroid belt is also called the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System.
By far the largest object within the belt is the dwarf planet Ceres. The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon.
In 1596, Johannes Kepler's sense of proportion for the planetary orbits led him to believe that an invisible planet lay between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Giuseppe Piazzi, discoverer of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt: Ceres was known as a planet, but later reclassified as an asteroid and from 2006 as a dwarf planet.
951 Gaspra, the first asteroid imaged by a spacecraft, as viewed during Galileo's 1991 flyby; colors are exaggerated
