Monster Asteroid Has A Mountain Taller Than Mount Everest

Faline · #1 ● 10-05-2011, 01:57 PM

A giant asteroid hurtling through our solar system's asteroid belt boasts a mountain that makes Everest look like an ant hill, it has been claimed.
Detailed scans of the surface show it is as big as the volcanoes of Hawaii - measured from the ocean floor.
Data provided by NASA's Dawn mission has shown more about the characteristics of the crater-filled monstrosity known as Vesta, the second most massive object in the solar system's asteroid belt.
Dawn is now circling the asteroid at an altitude of 420 miles, taking visible and infrared pictures to send back to earth. Each orbit takes 12.3 hours.

Massive: Data provided by NASA's Dawn mission has showed more about the specs of the crater-filled monstrosity known as Vesta:

Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission: We are learning many amazing things about Vesta, which we call the smallest terrestrial planet.'
Discovered in 1807, the asteroid had previously been scanned by the Hubble space telescope - revealing features such as the huge impact crater visible above.
Now NASA's Dawn spacecraft has been scanning it since July. Previously, Dawn had orbited at a height of 1,700 miles, but it moved closer to take the latest pictures - the most detailed yet of the asteroid.
'Like Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, Vesta has ancient basaltic lava flows on the surface and a large iron core,' says Russell.

Though Vesta is undoubtedly huge, it's not the largest asteroid in our solar system.
That distinction belongs to Ceres, which the $466million Dawn spacecraft will examine next after a year-long mission studying Vesta.
While stories of the earth being in danger from an impact by such a massive asteroid, scientists said there's little to worry about.

Mission: NASA's Dawn mission will spend a year mapping the surface of the Vesta asteroid:

Tim Spahr, the director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts told AFP: 'The risk of a really large asteroid impacting the Earth before we could find and warn of it has been substantially reduced.'
Raymond said: 'The variation in Vesta's brightness as the sun angle changes indicates that the surface of Vesta is very rough, causing light to scatter.
He added: 'Vesta's roughness is larger than most asteroids in the main asteroid belt.'