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Planetary action is certainly heating up this summer: Jupiter passed opposition last month, Saturn does so in June, and Mars reaches favorable viewing next month. And with dazzling Venus in the west and Mercury to joining it starting in late June, we’ll soon have all of the naked eye classical planets in the evening sky. Now, I want to turn your attention towards a potential naked eye object, one you’ve probably never seen: asteroid 4 Vesta. Vesta reaches opposition in 2018 on the night of June 19th. At 1.14 Astronomical Units (AU, 170.8 million kilometers) distant, this year’s opposition is...

Explanation: What would it be like to fly over the asteroid Vesta? Animators from the German Aerospace Center recently took actual images and height data from NASA's Dawn mission currently visiting Vesta to generate such a virtual movie. The above video begins with a sequence above Divalia Fossa, an unusual pair of troughs running parallel over heavily cratered terrain. Next, the virtual spaceship explores Vesta's 60-km Marcia Crater, showing numerous vivid details. Last, Dawn images were digitally recast with exaggerated height to better reveal Vesta's 5-km high mountain Aricia Tholus. Currently, Dawn is rising away from Vesta after being close...

The Dawn spacecraft is starting to get an eye-full of the Vesta asteroid.The probe expects to reach the 530km-wide body in late July, whereupon it will go into orbit around the rock. Vesta is what scientists term a protoplanet - a body that never acquired the proportions of "grown-up" planets such as Earth and Mars. It is nonetheless an impressive object - the second most massive asteroid in the belt of rocky debris that orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Nasa's (US space agency) Dawn satellite will be spending about 12 months at Vesta before moving on to Ceres which, at...