The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent papers involving scientists from the University of California, Davis, ...

IN SPACE JULY 24: In this handout from NASA, the giant asteroid Vesta is seen in an image taken from the NASA Dawn spacecraft about 3,200 miles above the surface July 24, 2011 in Space. The Dawn ...

Scientists working for the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute will play a lead role in the next phase of NASA's Dawn mission. Mission researchers will begin to bombard the surface of the giant ...

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When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. For decades, scientists thought that Vesta was a protoplanet rather than an asteroid. NASA's Dawn ...

NASA's Dawn spacecraft departed the asteroid Vesta early yesterday morning en route to a rendezvous with the carbon-rich dwarf planet Ceres in early 2015. The probe quietly entered into orbit around ...

These Hubble Space Telescope images of Vesta and Ceres show two of the most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region between Mars and Jupiter. The images are helping astronomers plan for the ...