Mars, on the other hand, is thought to have been shaped mostly during the period of primordial accretion and the so - called Late Heavy Bombardment, when asteroids carved out
massive impact basins and pushed up huge volcanoes.
New high - resolution observations of Vesta by the DAWN mission reveal that the creatr is part of an even larger
impact basin that was created by two
massive overlapping
impacts roughly around one and two billion years ago, which scooped out around one percent of the asteroid's estimated volume and blasted it into space (more from NASA's DAWN Mission and NEO Program; 1997 NASA / Hubble news release; Cornell University; Thomas et al, 1997; Kelley et al, 2003; and Jerry Coffrey, Universe Today, June 15 2009; and Russell et al, 2012; Jaumann et al, 2012; Marchi et al, 2012; and Schenk et al, 2012).