Asteroid Vesta Features Massive Mountain Twice the Size of Mount Everest

Want to see a big mountain? Take a look at Asteroid Vesta. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the massive asteroid, discovered a mountain that is taller than Mount Everest and almost as tall as the largest volcano in the solar system.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft snapped the photo on July 9th from a distance of more than 60,000 miles away. According to the Christian Science Monitor, each pixel in the image corresponds to roughly 5.8 miles.

Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, said in a statement:

“We are learning many amazing things about Vesta, which we call the smallest terrestrial planet… Like Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, Vesta has ancient basaltic lava flows on the surface and a large iron core … The south polar mountain is larger than the big island of Hawaii, the largest mountain on Earth, as measured from the ocean floor. It is almost as high as the highest mountain in the solar system, the shield volcano Olympus Mons on Mars.”

The Olympus Mons on Mars stands nearly 15 miles above the surface of Mars. The mountain on the Asteroid Vesta isn’t quite that tall, but it is more than twice the size of Mauna Loa, a volcano in Hawaii, which rises up 6 miles form the ocean floor, and Mount Everest, which is 5.5 miles tall.

According to the Associated Press the Asteroid Vesta is 330 miles in diameter and is the second-most massive object in the asteroid belt.

The Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta on July 15. The spacecraft will continue to orbit the massive asteroid for the next year, before it heads off to take photos of Ceres, an even bigger asteroid in our solar system.

What should NASA name the massive mountain on Asteroid Vesta?