Dawn and the vistas of Vesta

From a distance of 117,000 miles, NASA’s Dawn unmanned space probe captures the best picture yet of the asteroid Vesta, one of the two largest bodies in the solar system’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Launched in 2007, Dawn is scheduled to orbit and map Vesta before moving on to the asteroid belt’s largest resident, Ceres, in 2015. Mission scientists hope that the two asteroids – remnants of what may be an unformed or destroyed rocky planet beyond Mars’ orbit – will yield clues about the formation of the solar system.