Vesta Gets Close and Bright

By: Bob King | May 30, 2018

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Vesta, the brightest asteroid, puts on one of its best shows ever in June, when it shines
brightly enough to see without optical aid.

Vesta appears in a moonless sky starting about June 5th. It's well-placed for viewing around
midnight in early June and by 10:30 p.m. at month's end. Face southeast and look for the
bright planet Saturn and the "Teapot" of Sagittarius to get oriented. Then use the maps below.
SkyMap with additions by the author

Imagine if you could look up in the sky and see an asteroid with nothing but your eyeballs.
Guess what — you can! In the coming month, 4 Vesta will shine its brightest in years,
affording skywatchers a rare opportunity.

The second largest main belt asteroid and a bona fide protoplanet, Vesta reaches opposition
on June 19th, when it will come within 170.6 million kilometers of Earth, the closest it's been
in at least two decades.

Currently at magnitude 5.7, Vesta will climb to magnitude 5.3 at opposition on June 19th,
bright enough to pick out in less than perfect skies. By a stroke of good luck, Saturn will be
nearby (only 7.5° southeast) to help point the way. For observers at mid-northern altitudes,
extinction — the dimming of a celestial object due to absorption of light by the atmosphere at
low altitudes — will rob the asteroid of ~0.4 magnitude.
The window for naked-eye Vesta viewing begins June 5th, when the asteroid is well-placed
in the southeastern sky shortly before moonrise, and ends about July 16th, when it fades back
to magnitude 6.0, the traditional naked-eye limit. Peak viewing, when the asteroid is brightest
in a moonless sky, occurs from June 8–22.

Vesta plies the summer Milky Way during its brightest apparition in decades. To find it,
begin at Saturn then star-hop with the naked eye or binoculars to 3.8-magnitude Mu (μ)
Sagittarii. The asteroid is located 2.5°–4° northwest of that star through mid-June. Despite its
location in star-rich Sagittarius, Vesta has little competition from similarly bright stars,
making it easy to spot. Dates shown are for 0 hours Universal Time. For U.S. time zones,
subtract 4 hours for Eastern Time; 5 for Central; 6 for Mountain; and 7 for Pacific. For
example, May 15th, 0h UT = May 14th at 8 p.m. EDT. Click HERE or on the map for a
sweet, black-and-white pdf chart you can print for use outdoors.

The last time Vesta came this close, but not quite, was at the May 30, 2007, opposition. Then,
it glimmered at magnitude 5.4 from 171.2 million kilometers away. I made a special effort to
see it at the time but wished now I'd taken better notes. Here's what I wrote: "Seen with the
scope and naked eye. Dimly visible about 6 mag. along the Oph-Sco border."

Vesta starts out the month of June moving west in retrograde motion in Sagittarius near the
eye-catching M24 Star Cloud. On the nights of the June 14–15, it will pass less than ½°
southeast of the bright open cluster M23. Late in the month, Vesta segues into Ophiuchus
before doing an about-face and resuming direct motion in early August before looping back
to Sagittarius in early September. On the last nights of summer, it slides 1° south of the
Lagoon Nebula.
NASA's Dawn space mission studied Vesta (diameter 530 km) up close from July 2011 to
September 2012. It confirmed that many achrondrite meteorites in the HED group
(Howardites, eucrites, and diogenites) originated here. Dawn also discovered that the asteroid
had made tentative steps toward becoming a planet.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCAL / MPS / DLR / IDA

Vesta's shine has baffled astronomers for decades. The Moon reflects 12% of the light it
receives from the Sun; Vesta returns 43%. What makes it so bright? There are at least two
possibilities. Unlike the Moon and most small solar-system bodies that lack an atmosphere or
magnetic field, Vesta shows little space weathering. Space weathering occurs when high-
speed charged particles in the solar wind and micrometeorites bombard exposed rock,
vaporizing tiny particles of iron in the minerals. Over time, the vaporized metal coats the
rocks in a dark patina.
A slice of the eucrite meteorite NWA 3147 found in the Sahara Desert likely originated in a
lava flow on the surface of Vesta. The rock is composed of feldspar and pyroxene crystals.
Bob King

The Dawn spacecraft found no sign of this classic weathering on Vesta's crust, so either the
rocks there possess little iron or the asteroid is protected by a magnetic field, which would
fend off much of the damaging effects of solar gusts. Recent studies of residual magnetic
fields in meteorites derived from the minor planet provide indirect evidence of its existence.

Pity there wasn't enough money approved to provide a magnetometer for Dawn or we might
have a definitive answer to this conundrum. We do know that Vesta was hot enough in the
distant past to partially melt and differentiate into crust, mantle, and core, the first steps on a
journey to a planethood abruptly scotched by Jupiter. Perhaps the core once seethed with
molten iron, enough to generate a magnetic field for a time.

Even if Vesta eludes the naked eye from your location, take a look through binoculars or a
telescope. Any optical aid will show it as a "star" creeping across the Sagittarius Milky Way
night by night and week by week. Amateurs looking for a challenge will want to maximize
their Vestan experience by attempted to discern the asteroid's shape. As seen in the wonderful
sequence by astrophotographer Damian Peach, it's clearly oval.
Can amateur scopes make out the ovoid shape of Vesta? These photos — and comparison
images — were taken during the last favorable opposition in 2007.
Damian Peach

Vesta varies in apparent diameter from 0.20″ to 0.69″. The low end is impossible to see
visually, but the protoplanet will swell to its maximum size this apparition. If you've seen
Jupiter's moons as disks — not a terribly difficult feat in a 6-inch telescope at high
magnification — you might, I say might just see Vesta. Let's look at the specs.

In June, Jupiter's four Galilean moons have the following apparent diameters: Ganymede
(1.62″); Callisto (1.5″); Io (1.1″); and Europa (1.0″). While Europa looks very small indeed at
250×, I've seen all of them as disks in my 11-inch and 15-inch scopes. Vesta will be slightly
larger than half-a-Europa. Given top notch seeing conditions I suspect that the asteroid's oval
shape might be glimpsed at 500× in a 10-inch telescope.

Wait for a good night when Vesta's on the meridian and keep upping the magnification until
the atmosphere won't allow. Pay attention to the color. Some amateurs, including myself,
have noted a yellow hue. We'd love to hear about your attempts, successful or not.
Use these scene-setter maps along with the more detailed individual asteroid maps to get a
peek at 16 Psyche (magnitude ~10.5) and 13 Egeria (magnitude ~10.5) while you're waiting
for Vesta to rise. You'll need a 4-inch or larger scope to see them.
SkyMap with additions by the author

Several other relatively bright asteroids are currently prowling the June skies. As warm-ups
to Vesta viewing and to expand your list of minor planets, I've included finder maps for 16
Psyche and 13 Egeria, visible in the evening hours, and 9 Metis and 29 Amphitrite, visible
after midnight. Just click on the links for charts. Stars are plotted to magnitude 11.0 except in
the chart for 13 Egeria, which shows stars down to 11.5.
This map features two additional main belt asteroids located not far from Vesta in the pre-
dawn sky. Asteroid 9 Metis shines at magnitude 10.2 at opposition on June 16th, while 29
Amphitrite peaks at 9.9 on June 15the. Both are visible in a 3-inch scope under dark skies.
Click on the links above for detailed charts.
SkyMap with additions by the author

Vesta won't get this close again until sometime after 2040. I'm as excited as you are at the
opportunities. Hopefully, I'll do better on my observing notes this time around!

Asteroid with a 13-mile-high mountain is

now visible to the naked eye
Michael d'Estries

June 20, 2018, 12:01 p.m.

2.6k

100
Vesta, as captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in 2011, features a mountain that rises more than
65,000 feet above the asteroid's south pole. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Look up in nighttime sky anytime between now and July 16, and you just might spy our solar
system's brightest asteroid.

Vesta, a 326-mile-wide object residing in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, is about
to make its closest approach to Earth in nearly two decades. But don't worry, unlike other
close calls with asteroids in recent history, Vesta is in a stable orbit around the sun that will
only bring it within 106 million miles of Earth. Nonetheless, this convergence will make it
visible to the naked eye, with a magnitude brightness approaching a maximum of 5.3 this
week.

Unlike other asteroids, Vesta's internal geology mimics those of terrestrial planets, with a
metallic iron-nickel core covered by a surface crust of basaltic rock. In fact, it's this "frozen
lava" that gives Vesta its beautiful reflectivity, casting back 43 percent of all light that hits it.
(For comparison, our moon only reflects about 12 percent of all light.)
A true color image of Vesta's surface as captured by the Dawn space probe at a distance of 3,200 miles in July
2011. (Photo: NASA/JPL/MPS/DLR/IDA/Björn Jónsson)

A 2011 visit by the NASA space probe Dawn confirmed Vesta as our solar system's lone
remaining protoplanet, an embryonic remnant of the material that created future worlds like
Earth.

"We now know that Vesta is the only intact, layered planetary building block surviving from
the very earliest days of the solar system," Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for
the Dawn spacecraft, said during a 2012 press conference.
An imposing mountain borne from a violent past

Vesta's 65,000-foot high peak rises from the center of the Rheasilvia impact crater. A much older crater, named
Veneneia, was discovered underlying it. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Ancient pedigree isn't the only feature of Vesta that makes it a geologic celestial wonder. Its
south pole is also home to one of the tallest known mountains in the solar system.

"The south polar mountain is larger than the big island of Hawaii, the largest mountain on
Earth, as measured from the ocean floor," Dawn mission investigator Chris Russell told
reporters. "It is almost as high as the highest mountain in the solar system, the shield volcano
Olympus Mons on Mars."

Whereas Olympus Mons rises nearly 14 miles (72,000 feet) above the surface of Mars, the
unnamed peak on Vesta is just under 13 miles (65,000 feet) tall. It's located in a 314-mile-
wide crater, also one of the largest in the solar system, named Rheasilvia, after the
mythological vestal virgins of Rome. It's theorized that Rheasilvia and its central peak were
formed roughly 1 billion years ago from a massive planetary scale impact that delivered a
glancing blow at an estimated 11,000 miles per hour.

"Vesta was lucky," Peter Schultz, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at
Brown University, said in a statement. "If this collision had been straight on, there would
have been one less large asteroid and only a family of fragments left behind." Schultz
published a study on the asteroid's violent past in 2014.

A eucrite meteorite, originating from Vesta, that fell during a meteor shower over Australia in 1960. (Photo: H.
Raab/Wikimedia Commons)
Vesta's scrape with disaster would turn into a rare opportunity for scientists on Earth an eon
later. The collision that rocked its south pole is estimated to have ejected at least 1 percent of
the asteroid's mass into space, scattering a vast swath of debris throughout the solar system.
Some of those rocks later made their way to Earth. In fact, it's estimated that some 5 percent
of all space rocks found on Earth originated from Vesta, making it only a handful of solar
system objects beyond Earth (including Mars and the moon) where scientists have a
laboratory sample.

Look for Saturn to point the way

Vesta as it will appear in the night sky over the next several months. The asteroid will be visible to the naked
eye until the middle of July. (Photo: In-The-Sky.org)

While Vesta is our brightest asteroid, its distance and small size still make it a sporting
challenge to pick out with the naked eye. Your best bet is to use some high-powered
binoculars or a telescope. Either way, follow these instructions from Bob King at Sky and
Telescope to locate the correct patch of sky.

"To find it, begin at Saturn then star-hop with the naked eye or binoculars to 3.8-magnitude Mu (μ)
Sagittarii. The asteroid is located 2.5°–4° northwest of that star through mid-June. Despite its
location in star-rich Sagittarius, Vesta has little competition from similarly bright stars, making it easy
to spot."

According to those who have previously spotted Vesta, the asteroid exhibits a yellowish hue
and looks very much like a star. Grab a lawn chair, ditch the light pollution and look up!
Vesta won't be this close to Earth again until 2040.

Vesta: Facts About the Brightest Asteroid

By Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | May 29, 2018 04:05pm ET

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In this image of the giant asteroid Vesta obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, numerous impact
craters illustrate the asteroid's violent youth.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Vesta is the second most massive body in the asteroid belt, surpassed only by Ceres, which is
classified as a dwarf planet. The brightest asteroid in the sky, Vesta is occasionally visible
from Earth with the naked eye. It is the first of the four largest asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, Pallas
and Hygiea) to be visited by a spacecraft. The Dawn mission orbited Vesta in 2011,
providing new insights into this rocky world.

Celestial Police

In 1596, while determining the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, Johannes Kepler came to
believe that a planet should exist in the gap between Mars and Jupiter. Mathematical
calculations by Johann Daniel Titius and Johann Elert Bode in 1772 — later known as the
Titius-Bode law — seemed to support this prediction. In August 1798, a group known as the
Celestial Police formed to search for this missing planet. Among these was German
astronomer Heinrich Olbers. Olbers discovered the second known asteroid, Pallas. In a letter
to a fellow astronomer, he put forth the first theory of asteroid origin. He wrote, "Could it be
that Ceres and Pallas are just a pair of fragments … of a once greater planet which at one
time occupied its proper place between Mars and Jupiter?"

Olbers reasoned that the fragments of such a planet would intersect at the point of the
explosion, and again in the orbit directly opposite. He observed these two areas nightly, and
on March 29, 1807, discovered Vesta, becoming the first person to discover two asteroids.
After measuring several nights' worth of observations, Olbers sent his calculations to
mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who remarkably computed the orbit of Pallas in only 10
hours. As such, he was given the honor of naming the new body. He chose the name Vesta,
goddess of the hearth, and sister to Ceres. [Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA's Dawn
Spacecraft]
NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on July 17, 2011. It was taken
from a distance of about 9,500 miles (15,000 kilometers) away from the protoplanet Vesta. Each
pixel in the image corresponds to roughly 0.88 miles (1.4 kilometers)

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Physical characteristics of Vesta

Vesta is unique among asteroids in that it has light and dark patches on the surface, much like
the moon. Ground-based observations determined that the asteroid has basaltic regions,
meaning that lava once flowed across its surface. It has an irregular shape, roughly that of an
oblate spheroid (in nontechnical terms, a somewhat smooshed sphere).

 Diameter: 329 miles (530 kilometers)

 Mass: 5.886 X 1020 lbs. (2.67 x 1020 kilograms)
 Temperature: 85 to 255 K (minus 306 to 0 degrees Fahrenheit / minus 188 to minus 18
degrees Celsius)
 Albedo: 0.4322
 Rotation period: 5.342 hours
 Orbital period: 3.63 years
 Eccentricity: .0886
 Aphelion: 2.57 AU
 Perihelion: 2.15 AU
 Closest approach to Earth: 1.14 AU

Surface, composition and formation

When Vesta made a close approach to Earth in 1996, the Hubble Space Telescope mapped its
topographic surface and features. This revealed a large crater at the south pole that slices into
its interior. The crater averages 460 km in diameter — remember: Vesta itself is only 530 km
across. It cuts an average of 13 km into the crust, and most likely formed from an impact in
the asteroid's early life. The material ejected from this collision resulted in a number of
smaller — Vestoid — asteroids that orbit near their parent, as well as some of the meteorites
that have crashed into Earth.

Unlike most asteroids, the interior of Vesta is differentiated. Like the terrestrial planets, the
asteroid has a crust of cooled lava covering a rocky mantle and an iron and nickel core. This
lends credence to the argument for naming Vesta as a protoplanet, rather than as an asteroid.

Vesta's core accreted rapidly within the first 10 million years after the formation of the solar
system. The basaltic crust of Vesta also formed quickly, over the course of a few million
years. Volcanic eruptions on the surface stemmed from the mantle, lasting anywhere from 8
to 60 hours. The lava flows themselves ranged from a few hundred meters to several
kilometers, with a thickness between 5 to 20 meters. The lava itself cooled rapidly, only to be
buried again by more lava until the crust was complete. Dawn's gravity put its core at about
18 percent of Vesta's mass, or proportionally about two-thirds as massive as Earth's core.

In fact, if it weren't for Jupiter, Vesta could have had a good chance at becoming a planet.
"In the asteroid belt, Jupiter basically stirred things up so much that they weren't able to
easily accrete with one another," Dawn scientist David O'Brien, of the Planetary Science
Institute in Tucson, Arizona, told reporters in 2012.

"The velocities in the asteroid belt were really high, and the higher the velocity is, the harder
it is for things to merge together under their own gravity," O'Brien added.

In 1960, a fireball streaking through the sky over Millbillillie, Australia, announced the
arrival of a piece of Vesta on Earth. Composed almost entirely of pyroxene, a mineral found
in lava flows, the meteorite bears the same spectral signals as Vesta.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which visited the asteroid in 2012, discovered that the rocky body
had a surprising amount of hydrogen on its surface. It also found bright, reflective regions
that may have been left over from its birth.

"Our analysis finds this bright material originates from Vesta and has undergone little change
since the formation of Vesta over 4 billion years ago," said Jian-Yang Li, a Dawn
participating scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, in a statement.

A massive mountain towers over Vesta's southern pole. The enormous mountain reaches up
over 65,000 feet (20 kilometers) in height, making it nearly as tall as Olympus Mons, the
largest mountain (and volcano) in the solar system. Olympus Mons soars about 15 miles (24
kilometers) above the surface of Mars.

"The south polar mountain is larger than the big island of Hawaii, the largest mountain on
Earth, as measured from the ocean floor," Dawn principle investigator Chris Russell was
reported saying at a 2011 astronomical conference. "It is almost as high as the highest
mountain in the solar system, the shield volcano Olympus Mons on Mars."

Liquid water once flowed across the asteroid. Images captured by the Dawn spacecraft
revealed curved gullies and fan-shaped deposits within eight different Vesta impact craters.
All eight of the craters are thought to have formed within the last few hundred million years,
fairly recent in the lifetime of the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid.

"Nobody expected to find evidence of water on Vesta. The surface is very cold and there is
no atmosphere, so any water on the surface evaporates," study lead author Jennifer Scully, a
postgraduate researcher at UCLA, said in a NASA statement. "However, Vesta is proving to
be a very interesting and complex planetary body."

Scully and her team thought the features were created by debris flows, as opposed to pure-
water rivers or streams, sculpted the Vesta gullies. They proposed that meteorites bombarding
the asteroid melted ice deposits beneath the surface, sending liquid water and small rocky
particles flowing down the crater walls. Such activity suggests the presence of ice buried
beneath the surface.

"If present today, the ice would be buried too deeply to be detected by any of Dawn's
instruments," Scully said. "However, the craters with curved gullies are associated with pitted
terrain, which has been independently suggested as evidence for loss of volatile gases from
Vesta."
Ice could have been responsible for modifying Vesta's surface. In 2017, a study suggested
that smooth patches of terrain on the asteroid frequently possessed high concentrations of
hydrogen, which is often seen when solar radiation breaks down water molecules.

"We suggest that modifications of the surface by melting of buried ice could be responsible
for smoothing those areas," Essam Heggy, a planetary scientist at the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles, told Space.com. "Buried ice could have been brought to the
surface after an impact, which caused heated ice to melt and travel up through the fractures to
the surface."

Dawn also observed signs of hydrated minerals (minerals containing water molecules) on
Vesta's surface, which could also hint at the presence of buried ice. The hydrated materials
were associated with older terrains, and could have been delivered by impacts of material
from farther out in the solar system.

A low-altitude map of Vesta revealed a rich geology. The steep slopes found on the asteroid,
combined with its high gravity, paves the way for rocks to roll downward, exposing other
material. Dawn revealed a variety of mineral, including some bright and dark materials that
could relate to potential buried ice.
On its southern side the asteroid Vesta shows a huge crater. This picture shows the asteroid in an
image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (top, left), as a reconstruction based on theoretical
calculations (top, right), and as a topological map (bottom).

Credit: Ben Zellner (Georgia Southern University) / Peter Thomas (Cornell University) / NASA

Vestal visitors to Earth

In fact, Vesta's unique composition means that it is responsible for an entire group of
meteorites. The HED meteorites — made up of howardites, eucrites and diogenites — tell the
story of Vesta's early life. Eucrites form from hardened lava, while diogenites come from
beneath the surface. Howardites are a combination of the two, formed when a large impact
mixed the two sections together.

Vesta has been suspected as being the source of the HED meteorites since 1970. Dawn's
mapping spectrometer verified that proposition. The Dawn team thinks the HEDs came from
an impact basin named Rheasilvia, after an ancient Roman vestal virgin priestess. At 310
miles (500 kilometers) in diameter, Rheasilvia is nearly as large as Vesta itself. It most likely
formed from a collision that stripped away most of the southern hemisphere's crust, revealing
the asteroid's interior.

"Vesta likely came close to shattering," said Dawn principal investigator Carol Raymond,
noting that the blow left concentric sets of troughs — fracture lines — around Vesta's
equator.

Parallel troughs may be another sign of the enormous impact. Raymond told the Planetary
Society that the presence of those troughs suggests serious damage to the asteroid's interior.

If the orbit of Vesta lies beyond Mars, how did pieces of it manage to arrive on Earth? The
fragments of Vesta pass Jupiter once every three orbits around the sun, allowing the gravity
of the largest planet to affect them. Such tugging could have shifted the fragments enough to
cause their eventual impact with Earth.

As a result, Vesta is one of three bodies from which scientists have samples. The other two
are the moon and Mars.

Exploring the asteroid

In September 2007, NASA launched the Dawn mission, which is unique in that it was the
first craft to enter orbit around one solar system body, then proceed to a second. Dawn
entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011. After studying the asteroid for a year, it left Vesta
encountered Ceres in March 2015.

NASA's Dawn mission is to study the characteristics of the early solar system by analyzing
the two asteroids, which are very different. Ceres is wet, with seasonal polar caps, and may
have a thin atmosphere. Vesta, on the other hand, is dry and rocky. Studying the unique
spectral signatures in its rocky crust will expand our knowledge of our own planet, as well as
Mars and Mercury.
Given their size, the two are actually regarded as protoplanets, or small planets. The
gravitational pull of Jupiter disrupted their formation. Without the presence of the gas giant,
the two may well have continued to evolve into full-size planets.

"We now know that Vesta is the only intact, layered planetary building block surviving from
the very earliest days of the solar system," Dawn deputy principal investigator Carol
Raymond, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters in
2012.

Dawn's study of Vesta allowed for the creation of the best map to date of the asteroid.

In October 2010, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged Vesta again. The resulting data
revealed that the asteroid was tilted approximately four degrees more than scientists
originally thought. These findings helped NASA to place the spacecraft in the appropriate
polar orbit around the asteroid. Dawn requires light from the sun in order to perform its
mapping and imaging assignments.

Editor's note: This article was updated on May 29, 2018, to clarify that Vesta was not the
first asteroid to be visited by a spacecraft, but rather the first of the four largest asteroids to
be visited.