2011 November 28
Below should be a clip of Vesta's five hour rotation.
To find the most impressive cliffs and prominences in our universe, we should look towards the Asteroid Vesta. It boasts some of the steepest cliffs we have discovered, including an elevation of 22 kilometers. That's about three times Mount Everest's elevation (8.8 km.)! The gigantic space rock is 500 kilometers in diameter and is currently the focus of the Dawn Mission. The Dawn Mission's goal is to "characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch" by investigating two of the largest protoplanets (asteroids) that are still intact. As of now it has photographed an image that suggests huge landslides have occured along the asteroid's slopes.
From this point the Dawn Mission will travel down to a lower altitude orbit in order to better analyze Vesta's gravitational field. In 2012 it will blast away from Vesta's gravitational pull and investigate the only object in the asteroid belt that is larger - Ceres.
The Dawn Mission may prove instrumental in our understanding of the universe's early formation.
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