<div>Nasa's Dawn probe has returned the first full-frame images of the asteroid Vesta, and revealed the turbulent landscape of the asteroid belt proto-planet.
The pumpkin-shaped world is covered in cracks, barren plains, rocky mountains and deep craters that are filled with landslide debris.
The images reveal a planet that's been battered and bruised by many careening space objects over its 4.5 billion year life.
There's a truly massive crater at the southern hemisphere which was caused by a head-on collision. Around Vesta's equator lie curious parallel tracks that were likely caused by a glancing blow from a colossal object.
The images show the full surface area of Vesta -- not a particularly difficult task seeing as the asteroid takes just five hours and 20 minutes to turn on its axis.
"Now that we are in orbit around one of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system, we can see that it's a unique and fascinating place," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission manager at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Dawn entered orbit around the tiny not-quite-a-planet in July 2011, after four years of travel. Astronomers at Nasa hope that the lumpy space rock will provide some answers about the very earliest days of the solar system.
Dawn will study Vesta for an entire year before heading off towards its next destination, 900 million miles away. In 2015 it will arrive at the Texas-sized dwarf planet Ceres, where Dawn will find out if water ice is buried under the object's crust.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
