Tag Archives: impacts

When Gale was young

With Mars rover Curiosity safely down on Mars, scientists are set to explore the geology and history of Gale Crater, searching for evidence of habitable environments, ancient or modern. Gale Crater has attracted much study since it became a candidate … Continue reading

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Mars Rover Opportunity explores Cape York

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reached the south end of Cape York, a segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater about 700 meters (2,300 feet) long, on August 9, 2011. Scientists and engineers examined several targets there before driving the rover … Continue reading

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Did big impacts disrupt heat flow in the Martian mantle?

Mars shows more than 20 impact basins with diameters of at least 1,000 kilometers (600 miles), and five of these are 2,500 km wide or larger. Based on crater counts, most of the basins appear to have occurred between in … Continue reading

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Airblast avalanches

The aerial blast wave from a meteorite impact can trigger dust avalanches in the vicinity, says a new paper published in Icarus. A group of scientists led by Kaylan Burleigh (University of Arizona) reached this conclusion after studying a cluster … Continue reading

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How often does Mars get whacked?

Or — to pose this question more usefully — what’s the rate of crater-making impacts on Mars as compared to, say, the Moon? Why the Moon? Because it’s the one extraterrestrial body for which scientists have both a long visible … Continue reading

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Peeking into a stacked deck

No one is planning to send a Mars rover into the high latitudes (north or south) anytime soon, but if a paper in Icarus (June 2011) by Seth J. Kadish and James W. Head (both Brown University) is correct, scientists … Continue reading

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Big bangs

Really large meteorites produce impact scars big enough to be called basins. Although not defined by a particular size, basins differ from smaller craters in that the floor of a basin follows the planet’s curvature. New calculations published in the … Continue reading

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Chips off the old block?

Are Martian moons Phobos and Deimos escaped asteroids, as sometimes proposed? Robert Craddock (National Air and Space Museum) suggests in a paper in the February 2011 issue of Icarus they may have come from a large impact on Mars instead. … Continue reading

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