4 Vesta

Rare card · No. 62253

Vesta (minor-planet designation: 4 Vesta) is one of the 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. Vesta is thought to be the second-largest asteroid, both by mass and by volume, after the dwarf planet Ceres. Measurements give it a nominal volume only slightly larger than that of Pallas (about 5% greater), but it is 25% to 30% more massive. It constitutes an estimated 9% of the mass of the asteroid belt. Vesta is the only known remaining rocky protoplanet of the kind that formed the terrestrial planets. Numerous fragments of Vesta were ejected by collisions one and two billion years ago that left two enormous craters occupying much of Vesta's southern hemisphere. Debris from these events has fallen to Earth as howardite–eucrite–diogenite (HED) meteorites, which have been a rich...

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