Vesta is, in so many ways, the weirdest world that you are mapping here on CosmoQuest. It’s small enough to be non-spherical and is covered in the scars of its many impacts. The largest impact basins on its southern pole are records of some of the most defining moments in Vesta’s history. They are even responsible for the ridges around it s equator that first surprised scientists when the first high resolution images came back from Dawn.

Recently, a group of researchers simulated that impact in a laboratory and filmed it with a high speed camera. With a clear acrylic sphere letting us see the effects throughout the sphere, a projectile was fired at 16,000 miles per hour. Check it out for yourself in a video by Brown University:

The glancing blow disturbed the sphere to its core, blossoming out from the center, creating a crooked belt of sorts. The researchers point out that Vesta is pretty lucky that the collision wasn’t head on, because Vesta would have been no more than a pile of rubble.

So go enjoy the Vesta that survived over on AsteroidMappers!