NASA’s space probe Dawn is on its way to Vesta, scheduled to settle into orbit around the solar system’s second largest asteroid on July 16th, about a month from now. On June 1st, when Dawn was still 480,000 km (300,000 miles) away from Vesta, it captured a series of navigational images that have been put together into a short animation:
That is so cool. You can see features, still too small to see clearly, but they’re there. And you can see them move as Vesta rotates — the 20 frames of the animation are repeated five times, covering 30 minutes or about 1/12th of Vesta’s 5.34 hour rotation period. That dark spot near the center is possibly a crater 100 km (60 miles) across; we’ll know a lot more about it in the next few weeks.
