Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Vesta, named after the Roman goddess of home and hearth, is the second biggest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt. This photograph was taken by the Dawn Spacecraft, currently in orbit about 9,900 miles above the asteroid's surface. Dawn will spend the next year studying and photographing Vesta before moving on to the dwarf planet Ceres - arrival time: 2015. The Dawn spacecraft has been travelling for four years now and has logged more than 1.7 billion miles. This photograph, transmitted from Dawn back to Earth, traveled about 117 million miles. How's that for a long shot?
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