NASA has revealed the first close-up imagery of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in our solar system.
The ion-propelled spacecraft Dawn, which took nearly four years to reach the 330-mile-wide space rock, recorded the photos and beamed them to Earth on July 24, 2011.
Vesta is the second most massive object in the asteroid belt and has a surface area twice that of the state of California. Researchers think the asteroid formed some 4.6 billion years ago, an age that makes its pockmarked surface a crucial record of the early solar system.
Read more at Wired Science