Circling Vesta at 1,200 miles altitude, NASA's Dawn mission has produced a video of the battered second-largest asteroid in the solar system.
NASA, JPL
The Dawn team needed to ascertain the exact rotation of the asteroid before lowering the spacecraft's orbit for coming closer looks at Vesta, thought to be a planetary core that never quite collected enough material at the dawn of the solar system. According to a NASA statement:
"The zero-longitude, or prime meridian, of Vesta was defined by the science team using a tiny crater about 1,640 feet (500 meters) in diameter, which they named "Claudia," after a Roman woman during the second century B.C. Dawn's craters will be named after the vestal virgins—the priestesses of the goddess Vesta, and famous Roman women, while other features will be named for festivals and towns of that era."
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