The Dawn mission has been orbiting the asteroid Vesta since July 2011. It's taken thousands of images of the 500 kilometer-wide (300 mile) rock since then, and JPL just released an amazing video which uses real data from Dawn to simulate flying over the asteroid.
[embed width="610"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYxPw_T8Vlk[/embed]
Wow. The animation at Marcia Crater (the bottom crater making up the Snowman triple impact
) is especially beautiful and realistic! Dawn is scheduled to leave Vesta in August and then take a long, slow voyage to the even-larger asteroid Ceres, arriving in 2015. So we still have several months of riveting images of Vesta to look forward to. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Related Posts: - Dawn dips down to Vesta - Vesta's odd bottom - Vesta's double whammy - Vesta in breathtaking detail
