Vesta
An impact scar nearly as wide as Vesta itself, with a central peak 22 km high — among the tallest known mountains in the Solar System.
Surface conditions on Vesta
Every figure below is tagged with where it came from. Measured means an instrument read it on or at the body; modeled means it was computed and never directly observed.
What it would take to settle Vesta
No world off Earth is habitable — the honest habitable fraction of every surface here is zero. What can be answered is how far each one sits from Earth along the seven axes a habitat has to buy its way out of. Vesta scores 56.2 out of 100, on 100% coverage of the axes. The single worst axis here is pressure (Vacuum); the one that most sets Vesta apart from the other thirteen is water.
Below the Armstrong limit (0.062 bar) body fluids boil at body temperature — the difference between needing a mask and needing a pressure vessel. Above 1 bar the problem inverts into containment, and Venus at 92 bar has never let a lander live two hours.
Water is drinking water, breathing oxygen and rocket propellant in one deposit. A world without it has to import all three forever.
Delta-v sets what a launch costs; cruise time sets how much consumable, shielding and crew patience each kilogram of payload drags with it.
Shielding is mass, and mass is the single most expensive thing to move. Above roughly 1 mSv/day a surface habitat has to be buried.
Who has been to Vesta
Orbited by Dawn for 14 months. Never landed on.
Unprotected survival: Seconds.
Hydrated minerals delivered by carbonaceous impactors, but no surface ice — Vesta is dry and differentiated.
The named places on Vesta
The IAU has approved 106 names on Vesta, each drawn from a theme the naming committee chose for this world. Every name in the scene above is one of them, placed at its catalogued coordinates.
Sources
- Dawn Framing Camera — Dawn true colour, ~60 m/px (NASA Trek / USGS Astrogeology)
- IAU / USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
- NASA Dawn mission
Imagery is public-domain NASA/USGS mission data, streamed live from NASA Trek as a plate-carrée tile pyramid and draped on our own sphere — no third-party globe library and no cached copy of anyone else's map.