It's complicated: Dawn spacecraft spurs rewrite of asteroid Vesta's story

Just when scientists thought they had a tidy theory for how the giant asteroid Vesta formed, a new paper from NASA's Dawn mission suggests the history is more complicated. If Vesta's formation had followed the script for the formation of rocky planets like our own, heat from the interior would have created distinct, separated layers of rock (generally, a core, mantle and crust). In that story, the mineral olivine should concentrate in the mantle. However, that's not what Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) instrument found.

Read the whole article on Science Daily

More from Science Daily