Vesta from about 62,000 miles. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDAbri

Here’s a new image of Vesta as seen from the Dawn spacecraft.  It was taken on July 1, 2011 from a distance of about 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) away from the protoplanet Vesta. Each pixel in the image corresponds to roughly 5.8 miles (9.3 kilometers).

This month begins a year long observation of the protoplanet when Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta.  Eventually the spacecraft will get just 120 miles above the surface during the mapping phase where it will remain for 70 days.

Currently the spacecraft is about 35,000 miles from Vesta and approaching at 50 meters/sec (or 110 miles per hour).  Visit the Dawn website for all the scoop.

Shuttle update: Mike Fossum and Ron Garan completed installing the Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) experiment onto a platform on Dextre, the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator during a spacewalk today.

No word on the piece of debris from a old Soviet Cosmos 375 satellite that everyone was watching for the possibility of interfering with the ISS/Shuttle mission.  These encounters are not all that rare anymore with an estimated half million bits of junk orbiting around.  As long as we know about them we can work around them.  Seems that eventually if the junk doesn’t re-enter it could form a ring around the Earth and we can join the ranks of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune as a ringed planet, of course our ring will be garbage.  Hmmmm.