There’s certainly a lot happening in space lately. The shuttle reitring, the Chinese talking about putting up a space station soon and Virgin Galactic’s first commercial flight getting closer.

One which interests me in particular is the arrival of NASA’s Dawn probe at Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the belt.

As it stands we have very little information about the Asteroids, just blurry telescope shots. Dawn will rectify that when it spends one year at Vesta before moving off to orbit Ceres, the largest Asteroid.

To celebrate Dawn’s arrival at Vesta, I have added a preliminary model of Vesta to Solar Explorer. It’s preliminary because it’s based on what data we have available, which is a rough shape estimate, which I’ve textured to look a bit like Deimos until we get better photos of Vesta from all sides.