Vesta is not an intact protoplanet
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - 08:00
in Astronomy & Space
Nearly forty years ago, Guy Consolmagno was young graduate student at the University of Arizona's Department of Planetary Sciences; his work there with the late Michael Drake first proposed that asteroid Vesta was the parent body of the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite (HED) clan of basaltic meteorites. Last month, at the annual meeting of the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences, that identification was called into question by the same scientist who first proposed it.