This cache is part of a 1:133,700,000 scale model of the solar system. The dome on the Monroe County Courthouse in downtown Bloomington serves as a model of the sun. Vesta is 560-578 km wide and 458 km tall, so this model is about an eighth of an inch wide and three sixteenths of an inch tall. Vesta ranges from 323 to 385 million kilometers from the sun, so I've hidden the cache about 1.62 miles from the Courthouse.
Vesta is the second largest object in the asteroid belt (Ceres is the largest), an oblate spheroid with an immense crater (the Rheasilvia crater) at the south pole. The crater, which has a large peak in its center was created by a massive impact sometime in the last billion years which scattered bits and pieces of Vesta across the asteroiod belt. It is very likely that some of those pieces eventually made their way to Earth and crashed as meteorites. It's rare that we can pinpoint the origins of meteorites, so Vesta is one of only six Solar System bodies that we have identified samples from. The other ones are Mars, the Moon, comet Wild 2 (the Stardust spacecraft swept up some particles from its coma back in 2004), the asteroid Itokawa (the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft landed there in 2005), and of course, Earth itself.
In September 2007, NASA launched a probe (named Dawn) to visit the asteroid belt. It will arrive at Vesta in August of 2011. Dawn arrived at Vesta on July 12, 2011, and so there's lots of fantastic new pictures to ooh and ah at, including snowman craters!
I hid this cache along the route that Kiralira and I often use for walking our dog Duncan, so depending on your timing, we might spot you searching.
The only thing keeping this cache from being a 1-star-terrain cache is the fact that someone in a wheelchair would need to have very long arms to reach the cache.
Congratulations to Geomafiosa for the first-to-find!