Why is vesta a dwarf planet

DART's mission is to determine if flying a spacecraft into a small solar system body could be a reliable technique to deflect an asteroid. Futuristic electric thrusters emitting a cool blue glow will guide the Psyche spacecraft through deep space to a metal-rich asteroid.

What's the next big thing? What might space missions in and beyond set out to discover? Full Moon Guide: August - September Models and lab tests suggest the asteroid could be venting sodium vapor as it orbits close to the Sun, explaining its increase in brightness. Perched atop a stand in a high-ceilinged clean room, DART is beginning to look like the intrepid spacecraft that will aim itself directly into an asteroid.

Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets, are rocky remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system. NASA approved the Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope to move to the next phase of mission development after a successful review.

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As the planet cooled, a thin solid crust formed over the mantle. Later, meteorites brought iron and other elements to the crust. Most of the bulk of a planet like Earth is mantle. But mantle-type rocks are rare among asteroids and meteorites. Planetary scientists have called this the "missing mantle problem. In the recent Nature Communications paper, Yin and UC Davis graduate students Supratim Dey and Audrey Miller worked with first author Zoltan Vaci at the University of New Mexico to describe three recently discovered meteorites that do include mantle rock, called ultramafics, that include mineral olivine as a major component.

The UC Davis team contributed precise analysis of isotopes, creating a fingerprint that allowed them to identify the meteorites as coming from Vesta or a very similar body. NASA's Dawn mission remotely observed rocks from the largest south pole impact crater on Vesta in but did not find mantle rock. Because it is so small, Vesta formed a solid crust long before larger bodies like the Earth, moon and Mars. So the siderophile elements that accumulated in its crust and mantle form a record of the very early solar system after core formation.

Over time, collisions have broken pieces off Vesta that sometimes fall to Earth as meteorites. Yin's lab at UC Davis had previously collaborated with an international team looking at elements in lunar crust to probe the early solar system. It had been thought that Vesta and the larger inner planets could have got much of their material from the asteroid belt. But a key finding from the study was that the inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and moon, Mars and inner dwarf planets got most of their mass from colliding and merging with other large, molten bodies early in the solar system.

The asteroid belt itself represents the leftover material of planet formation, but did not contribute much to the larger worlds. Explore further.

Meng-Hua Zhu et al, Common feedstocks of late accretion for the terrestrial planets, Nature Astronomy