Locating the LCROSS Impact Craters

Scouring the surface: Ejecta dynamics and the LCROSS impact event

The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission (LCROSS) impacted the moon in a permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater on October 9th 2009, excavating material rich in water ice and volatiles. The thermal and spatial evolution of LCROSS ejecta is essential to interpretation of regolith properties and sources of released volatiles. The unique conditions of the impact, however, m...

Impact craters on Titan

Five certain impact craters and 44 additional nearly certain and probable ones have been identified on the 22% of Titan’s surface imaged by Cassini’s high-resolution radar through December 2007. The certain craters have morphologies similar to impact craters on rocky planets, as well as two with radar bright, jagged rims. The less certain craters often appear to be eroded versions of the certai...

Impact induced damage beneath craters

Ackermann et al. (1975) described the subsurface structure of Meteor Crater and identified a fractured rock zone extending to about 1 km deep. The depth of the fractured/damage zone can be used to extract information about the impact cratering process. We impacted rock samples (San Marcos gabbro) in the laboratory and imaged the damage structure using both dicing and tomography methods. We prop...

Impact Craters in the Solar System

The missing large impact craters on Ceres

Asteroids provide fundamental clues to the formation and evolution of planetesimals. Collisional models based on the depletion of the primordial main belt of asteroids predict 10-15 craters >400 km should have formed on Ceres, the largest object between Mars and Jupiter, over the last 4.55 Gyr. Likewise, an extrapolation from the asteroid Vesta would require at least 6-7 such basins. However, C...