what to see on
Vesta

For a scenic browse, and an answer-page for Guess The World...

Vestafrom DAWN probe data - in some ways as good as a story

a vestan jungle

...All around them in the thin sunlight rose slender trees whose enormous green leaves grew directly from the trunks.  This grotesque forest was made more dense by festoons of writhing "snake-vines", weird rootless creepers which crawled like plant-serpents from one tree to another.  Each stir of wind brought white spore-dust down in a shower from the trees.

The few living creatures of this forbidding landscape were equally alien.  Big white meteor-rats scurried on their eight legs through the brush.  Phosphorescent flame-birds shot through the upper fronds like streaks of fire...

Edmond Hamilton, The World With a Thousand Moons (Amazing Stories, December 1942)

>>  Guess the World

looking down at vesta from orbit

“Funny place, Vesta,” observed Mike Shea.  “I was down there two-three times.  What a dump!  It’s all covered with some stuff like snow, only it ain’t snow.  I forget what they call it.”

“Frozen carbon dioxide?” prompted Moore.

“Yeah, dry ice, that carbon stuff, that’s it.  They say that’s what makes Vesta so shiny.”

“Of course!  That would give it a high albedo.”

Mike cocked a suspicious eye at Moore and decided to let it pass.  “It’s hard to see anything down there on account of the snow, but if you look close” – he pointed – “you can see a sort of gray smudge.  I think that’s Bennett’s dome.  That’s where they keep the observatory.  And there is Calorn’s dome up there.  That’s a fuel station, that is.  There’re plenty more, too, only I don’t see them.”

Isaac Asimov, Marooned Off Vesta (Amazing Stories, March 1939)

>>  Guess The World - Fourth Series

Solar System Heritage