Vesta and other asteroid collage

    Caption: A collage image showing the comparative sizes of 9 asteroids:

    1. 4 Vesta.
    2. 21 Lutetia.
    3. 253 Mathilde.
    4. 243 Ida.
    5. Dactyl (about 1.5 km), the moon of 243 Ida. Barely visible in the image.
    6. 433 Eros.
    7. 951 Gaspra.
    8. 2867 Steins.
    9. 25143_Itokawa. Barely visible in the image.

    Features:

    1. The Vesta image is from Dawn probe that reached Vesta on 2011 Jul16.

    2. Vesta has dimensions 578 X 560 X 458 km with a mean diameter (of some kind) of 529 km.

    3. Vesta shows evidence of RESIDUAL/RADIOACTIVE-HEAT GEOLOGY in its early day: e.g., some of its crust is basalt which probably formed from lava from early volcanism.

    4. Vesta is considered to be protoplanet since it has undergone chemical differentiation. Lutetia has some protoplanet features.

    5. The astronomers started running short long ago of mythological persons like Eros (who got 433 Eros) for naming asteroids after.

      So they started naming them after real people: e.g., 253 Mathilde after Mathilde Leowy (wife of astronomer Maurice Loewy (1833--1907)) and 5535 Annefrank after Anne Frank (1929--1945).

    Credit/Permission: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA/ESA, 2011 (uploaded to Wikipedia by User:Eumeldingens, 2011) / Public domain.
    Image link: Wikipedia.
    File: Asteroid file: 004_vesta_collage.html.