File:Pallas - Potw2008a.jpg
Although Pallas is the largest known asteroid in the Solar System after Ceres and Vesta, it is the only one of these large asteroids that has not been visited by a spacecraft. This is due to its orbit, which has an unusually high inclination to the plane of the Earth’s orbit — which means it is particularly challenging to land a spacecraft on.
These new images show that the surface of Pallas displays very interesting topographic features suggesting a violent collisional history. Numerous large craters are found in both hemispheres of Pallas, forming a surface resembling a golf ball. The two distinct large impact basins on its surface could also be related to a family-forming impact — a collision which caused an original object to fracture into several separate bodies. The bright spot which appears in the southern hemisphere of Pallas (right image) is also very reminiscent of the salt deposits on Ceres.