asteroid
Vesta
A battered protoplanet with a giant south-polar basin.
Vesta is the second-largest body in the main belt by mass and was visited by Dawn.
- Orbit representation
- verified fallback
- Surface
- procedural reconstruction
Reference measurements
The numbers that shape this world
- Mean radius
- 262.7 km
- Semi-major axis
- 2.362 AU
- Orbital period
- 3.629 Earth yearsKeplerian estimate from the catalogued semi-major axis.
- Eccentricity
- 0.089
- Inclination
- 7.14°
- Visual geometry
- irregular
Orbital character
A measured small-body path in the shared reference frame
Vesta follows a catalogued path with a 2.362 AU semi-major axis, eccentricity 0.089, and 7.14° inclination. The resulting two-body period estimate is 3.629 Earth years; the representation notes below state the source epoch and precision boundary used by Explore.
Catalogue context
Vesta among its nearest Helios peers
Vesta is linked with Ceres, Pallas, Hygiea inside the Helios main-belt selection. The grouping keeps adjacent reading coherent; it does not imply that these bodies share the same composition, origin, or present physical state.
Representation notes
What Explore is showing
A bundled frozen six-element preview preserves the documented body scope. It was not freshly re-fetched from SBDB in this build environment and must not be presented as an accurate or current ephemeris.
Reference-guided visual reconstruction based on cited mission records; no source raster is reproduced.
Provenance