  For decades the limited thickness of Vesta's basaltic crust, revealed by the
link between the asteroid and the howardite-eucrite-diogenite family of
meteorites, and its survival to collisional erosion offered an important
constraint for the study of the early evolution of the Solar System. Some
results of the Dawn mission, however, cast doubts on our understanding of
Vesta's interior composition and of the characteristics of its basaltic crust,
weakening this classical constraint. In this work we investigate the late
accretion and erosion experienced by Vesta's crust after its differentiation
and recorded in the composition of eucrites and diogenites and show that it
offers an astrochemical window into the earliest evolution of the Solar System.
In our proof-of-concept case study focusing on the late accretion and erosion
of Vesta's crust during the growth and migration of Jupiter, the water
enrichment of eucrites appears to be a sensitive function of Jupiter's
migration while the enrichment in highly-siderophile elements of diogenites
appears to be particularly sensitive to the size-frequency distribution of the
planetesimals. The picture depicted by the enrichments created by late
accretion in eucrites and diogenites is not qualitatively affected by the
uncertainty on the primordial mass of Vesta. Crustal erosion, instead, is more
significantly affected by said uncertainty and Vesta's crust survival appears
to be mainly useful to study violent collisional scenarios where highly
energetic impacts can strip significant amounts of vestan material while
limitedly contributing to Vesta's late accretion. Our results suggest that the
astrochemical record of the late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust
provided by eucrites and diogenites can be used as a tool to investigate any
process or scenario associated to the evolution of primordial Vesta and of the
early Solar System.
