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NASA's VestaTrek - Visit Asteroid Vesta
Armchair astronauts, get out your game controllers and go visit Vesta, the asteroid homesteader's dream! Really, it's amazing. Find your farm!
(From VestaTrek)
Click on the picture link to go to NASA's amazing VestaTrek site that lets you zoom around Vesta using the latest photos. Use 3D to orbit the asteroid; look at the north and south pole, search for features, see it in a whole new light (actually, different lights).
3D printing fans will have a field day printing out asteroid landscapes, too.
Now, NASA just needs to start the Asteroid Homesteaders' School, just like Raymond Z. Gallun suggested in his 1951 classic Asteroid of Fear!
All members of the Endlich family had been looking around them at the weird Vestal landscape. Through John Endlich's mind again there flashed a picture of what this asteroid was like. At the Asteroids Homesteaders' School in Chicago, where his dependents and he had been given several weeks of orientation instruction, suitable to their separate needs, he had been shown diagrams and photographs of Vesta. Later, he had of course seen it from space.
After all, there's a lot to know when you start a farm on an asteroid. Do you know how to operate an atom drill, pitch a airtight tent and dig an asteroid garden?
As John Endlich's loyal farm wife, Rose, said to him:
"Remember—we've got to make good here, Johnny," she was saying. "Remember what the Homesteaders Office people told us—that with modern equipment and the right frame of mind, life can be nice out here. It's worked on other asteroids. What if we are the first farmers to come to Vesta?..."
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