Diameter: 573 km
SMA: 2.362 AU
Period: 3.6325 years
Eccentricity: 0.08862
Rotation: 0.2226 days
Inclination: 7.134°
Axial tilt: 0°

Mass: 2.59076x10²⁴kg
Density: 3456 kg/m³
Gravitation: 0.25 m/s²
Escape velocity: 0.36 m/s
Orbit velocity: 19.34 km/s (mean)

Moons: 0

rock and ice

Vesta is the second most massive asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Dawn spacecraft circled Vesta from 16 July 2011 until 5 September 2012, when it departed and began its journey to dwarf planet Ceres.

The giant asteroid is almost spherical, and so is nearly a dwarf planet. Unlike most known asteroids, it has separated into crust, mantle and core (a characteristic known as being differentiated), much like Earth. Understanding why this is so was one of the objectives of the Dawn mission. The answer turned out to be that Vesta formed early, within 1 to 2 million years of the birth of the solar system. Short-lived radioactive material that was incorporated into bodies that formed during this epoch heated them to the point where -- in cases like Vesta -- the objects melted, allowing the denser materials to sink to the asteroid's core and the lower density materials to rise.