Vesta

In Roman mythology, the goddess of the hearth, equivalent with the Greek Hestia. In Rome, the sacred flame in her shrine at the Forum represented the spirit of the community, and was kept constantly alight by the six Vestal Virgins.

She was closely associated with the lares and penates, family household gods, and was also the goddess of bakers and the asses which turned their millstones. Her festival, the Vestalia, was celebrated on 8 June.

Traditionally the legendary king Numa Pompilius introduced her worship to Rome from Lavinium, where the Trojan hero Aeneas had brought the sacred fire from Troy along with the penates. It was believed that Numa built her central shrine in the Forum.

Vesta

Third-largest asteroid in the Solar System, 500 km/310 mi in diameter, discovered in 1807 by German astronomer Heinrich Olbers. Vesta orbits the Sun at a distance of 353 million km/219 million mi, with a period (time taken to circle the Sun) of 3.63 years. It is the only asteroid that ever becomes bright enough to be seen without a telescope.

In July 1999, the NASA space probe Deep Space 1 photographed the small asteroid Braille. The spectrum of light given off by Braille leads US astronomers to conclude that Braille has the same composition as Vesta and so was probably chipped off during a past impact. Vesta has a shallow crater at its South Pole indicating that a large chunk of rock has been dislodged at some point.