Vesta is a well-known place in terms of space exploration, but one people don’t necessarily know a lot about, let alone understand why NASA should even send a mission there. So, I’ve decided to write a quick post to tell the story.
“Ceres and Vesta are the two most massive residents of the asteroid belt. Vesta is a rocky body, while Ceres is believed to contain large quantities of ice. The profound differences in geology between these two protoplanets that formed and evolved so close to each other form a bridge from the rocky bodies of the inner solar system to the icy bodies, all of which lay beyond in the outer solar system. At present, most of what we now know about Vesta and Ceres comes from ground-based and Earth-orbiting telescopes like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The telescopes pick up sunlight reflected from the surface in the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared, and by emitted radiation in the far-infrared and microwave regions.” (This is the whole page)
Vesta, in particular, is a quite special asteroid. “Vesta is the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, a 330-mile-wide (530 kilometer) titan in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that is sometimes visible to the naked eye on Earth. The only larger asteroid is Ceres, which is also classified as a dwarf planet. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbited Vesta from 2011 to 2012 to learn more about the asteroid and, potentially, the composition of the solar system.” (Scientific American, 2017)
Looking into the Asteroid Belt is going to provide an exceptional insight into the Solar System history, and that’s the very reason why we do send missions over there.
For a closer look, here you have two nice videos about the Asteroid Belt:
This one is also cool, with the same probe getting to the second target after Vesta, Ceres:
Fascinating. It does set the imagination flying, doesn’t it? These bodies might very well represent one of humanity’s stepping stones toward further exploration – or am I being influenced by too many Expanse books? 😉
Oh yes, me too! 😉