Asteroid Vesta

thingiverse

A model of Asteroid 4 Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the main belt between Earth and Mars, is now printable. The Dawn probe's images serve as its source, as NASA has not yet released a 3D model. Vesta, a partially differentiated body, has a rounded shape; however, much of its south pole was removed in a collision with another body. A creative approach to printing the globe involved using an online point cloud generator with individual frames from an orbit view, but this resulted in distortion at the poles. An alternative technique employed Rhino3D's ApplyMeshUVN command, using a projected map of Vesta and creating an oblate spheroid matching its approximate ratio of equatorial vs polar diameters. The mesh was positioned above the spheroid and wrapped around it. This method is effective for relatively regular differentiated bodies but may not work with irregularly shaped objects like asteroids Kleopatra, Toutatis, or comets. The technique can also be used to create small globes of planets and moons by downloading flat projected maps from the USGS.