Watch: NASA Captures Video of ‘Vesta’ Asteroid

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This big asteroid, called Vesta, doesn’t look THAT scary. Then again, it’s 300,000 miles away from the camera. I’m sure it’d look a whole lot scarier from, say, 30,000 miles away. And 3,000 miles away? No thanks.

As a tech guy that doesn’t normally cover space stuff, though, I’d say Vista was a hell of a lot scarier than Vesta, but NASA’s fixing to get a lot closer to Vesta over the coming weeks.

The above video was captured by NASA’s “Dawn” spacecraft, which is actually comprised of 20 still images stitched together and looped.

Per NASA:

“The video loops 20 images obtained for navigation purposes on June 1. The images show a dark feature near Vesta’s equator moving from left to right across the field of view as Vesta rotates. Images also show Vesta’s jagged, irregular shape, hinting at the enormous crater known to exist at Vesta’s south pole.

The images were obtained by a framing camera during a 30-minute period and show about 30 degrees of a rotation. The pixel size in these images is approaching the resolution of the best Hubble Space Telescope images of Vesta.”

Dawn is planning to orbit Vesta on July 16th, and NASA will be releasing more images and videos between now and then.

Read More: Dawn Captures Video on Approach to Asteroid Vespa