Vesta

The NASA Dawn spacecraft has returned images after starting its orbit around the asteroid Vesta – and various blogs and web sites have a picture of a lump of rock with depressions in it caused by smaller objects hitting it (the commonest culprit) – see www.jpl.nasa.gov/news.cfm?release=2011-213&cid=release_2011-213. Vesta is 330 miles across, or 530km, one of the biggest objects in the Asteroid Belt. Vesta is thought to be a source of meteorites that hit the earth from time to time.