NASA Spots Huge New Crater on Mars

Scientists using images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, discovered a new crater on the surface of Mars.   The crater was formed by a March 2012 impact and is large enough to cover half of a football field.  

The culprit that created the crater was most likely  a car-size asteroid.  The Martian event is similar to an impact event over Chelyabinsk, Russia, which shattered windows, damaged hundreds of buildings and left more than 1,000 people injured.

Read the complete Science article HERE

Oldest Impact Crater Discovered

Unlike the airless bodies in the Solar System, The Earth as a general example shows evidence of the massive and violent bombardment several billion years ago. Finding any evidence of ancient bombardment is more a scientific version of poke and hope. Continental drift plus the effects of rain, wind, plus the effects of the seasonal weather erase many of the structures that identify an impact crater.
From the article:

• Now, an international team of scientists say they have found a massive impact crater in Greenland a billion years older than other known asteroid impact on Earth.

The crater is located in the Maniitsoq region of West Greenland and is roughly one billion years older that the next oldest crater. What is truly amazing though is the huge diameter of the Greenland impact which measures a stunning 62 miles across!

Craters of the age of the Greenland impact have been all but obliterated, however the crust around Greenland:

• has been eroded over the eons to expose crust that originally was 16 miles below the surface. Effects of the immense shock-wave produced on impact penetrated deep into the crust and remain visible.

read the complete article here

Earth's most pristine crater discovered

Using Google Earth, Italian researchers discovered what may be Earth's best preserved crater. The crater Kamil, is located in a remote area of the Sahara desert.

From the Gizmodo article:

• The crater measures 147 ft at its widest point and 52 ft deep at its deepest. Using those numbers, scientists estimate that the meteor that hit Earth was only 4.2 ft in diameter (but was traveling at 8,000MPH!).

The crater is so well preserved that it still retains the bedrock splatter patter that one often only sees on airless bodies. Most craters on Earth erode fairly quickly due to the weather.

Another cool thing about the crater is that it is mostly likely only a few thousand years old!

That's no moon...

Remember that great line from Star Wars? Well we get a chance to use it again with the moon that has been described as resembling Star Wars' Death Star. We are talking about of Mimas, one of Saturn's moons. As you can see in the photo that accompanied the Dvice article you can see the massive, 81-mile-wide Herschel impact crater. However, viewed in infrared we see the Mimas has an ummm uniquely different cast. Yep that Pac-man.

NASA was using the Cassini spacecraft to capture highest resolution temperature scans of Mimas when this unusual picture came up. So what caused this unusual result? Well, NASA scientists suspect the temperatures are revealing differences in texture on the surface. Which means that when the large body that struck Mimas making the Herschel impact crater, the dust kicked up settled in the odd pattern that absorbs, which makes the odd pattern instead of the more natural gradation of temperatures.

Dvice article

Oh...and FYI we have a conversation going on in the comments....LMAO Dorn may well have called this....

HiRISE releases new pictures of Mars

Hey check out these pictures that Shaun Saunders just sent me the link to. They are in an article at cnn.com on the technology page.

The pics are from the University of Arizona, Tucson, using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera mounted on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have just released a bunch of pictures, which show the surface of Mars from the perspective of a plane flying over the surface. Not computer generated, but what it would REALLY look like if were looking out the window of a plane.

The picture in the post is Victoria Crater. There is a link on the article for more pics...spectacular.

The "Webcam" vs. the "Particle Beam"

Now here is something you don't see everyday (I'd say, it's something you don't ever 'want' to see)

I caught this on Make's blog about a test demonstrating the hell on electronics deep space can be.

A web camera is placed into a particle beam to show visually the affects of space radiation on electronics. This video shows the particles striking the camera along with streaks due to high angle impacts. In addition particles striking the audio circuit can be heard and the damage to the camera CCD is illustrated at the end of the video.This video was produced as an Education and Public Outreach product for the CRaTER Instrument (http://crater.bu.edu) that will fly on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission (http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/).

Astronomers Puzzled by Titan's Missing Craters

The Cassini spacecraft’s radar sweep of Saturn’s largest moon Titan in January revealed a portion of what appears to be a 110 mile (180 kilometer) diameter This would only be the fourth such crater discovered on Titan, a surprisingly small number. Impact cratering is pervasive in our solar system. Earth's Moon remains heavily pockmarked because it has no significant weather or geological processes to wipe its face clean. Earth, similarly bombarded over the eons, shows many scars from relatively recent impacts that have not had time to weather away. Craters are common on several other satellites of Saturn. If Titan's surface had the same density of craters that other Saturnian moons have, there should be thousands of craters. With only three and a half dozen possibles, the question is "where did all the craters go?" Titan’s thick nitrogen atmosphere is partly responsible. It hinders the formation of impact craters less than about 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter, because smaller space rocks burn up before they reach the surface. Clues to Titan’s smooth finish can be seen in the presence of vast tracts of sand dunes, river channels and evidence for cryovolcanism visible in Cassini images. It is likely that a combination of burial in sand, erosion by methane or obliteration by the cold hand of cryovolcanism is responsible for paving over the craters.

Submitted by Shaun A. Saunders