Desai, et al. [1] simulated microparticle lunar impact craters using laser impacts. They produced crater diameters of several hundred μm in Al. Ford [2] made observations about lunar craters simulated by spark-machining on metal. These were also very small scale craters. This work expands the size of simulated impact craters from their sub-millimeter craters to craters over a centimeter and exp...

Motivation Recent observations of planetary bodies have revealed surface activities that have intrigued the science community. Image sequences of Saturn’s moon Enceladus have shown what appears to be icy particles ejecting from its south polar regions. High resolutions images from the Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have captured recent activities on the interior of cra...

Introduction: Impact craters are the dominant feature on any planetary surface and this dominance is used for the estimation of age of planets by crater count [1]. Such dominance gathered attention to detect them automatically in DTM [2] and panchromatic [3] images. Most of the crater detection algorithm (CDA) fall short to classify the crater and extract contextual information (presence/absenc...

Misra [1] has strong reservations on our finding of Archean crustal signatures in the Lonar crater impact breccia. Our inference was based on textural, mineralogical, trace element and Nd, Sr, Pb isotopic analyses of the target basalts and the impact breccia rocks of the crater [2], whereas Misra's arguments are based on the non-in situ nature of some of the impact breccia samples of the crater...

We derived crater production functions and chronology functions of Phobos for two scenarios, which likely represent the end-members of its dynamical evolution. Case A assumes that Phobos has been in its current orbit about Mars since its formation. Case B assumes a recent capture of Phobos and the impact history of an average Main Belt Asteroid. We determined the age of an average surface to th...

The objective of this study was to obtain a quantitative understanding of the crateting process over a broad range of conditions. Our approach was to numerically compute the evolution of impact induced flow fields and calculate the time histories of the key measures of crater geometry (e.g. depth, diameter, lip height) for 9 2 variations in planetary gravity (0 to 10 cin/s ), material strength ...

Introduction: We have investigated the structurally complex and highly fractured near-surface of the Barringer (aka Meteor) Crater, Arizona. The Barringer Crater is situated near Winslow, Arizona, and is one of the best preserved impact craters in the world. The crater was excavated some 49,000 years ago by the impact of an iron-nickel meteorite which hit the preexisting Colorado Plateau with a...

Widespread detection of phyllosilicates (clay minerals) in Noachian (>3.5 Ga) terrains on Mars and their paucity in younger terrains have led to the hypothesis that Noachian conditions were more clement than the colder, drier conditions that have since followed. However, recent clay detections in several Hesperian impact craters suggest that fluvial transport and alteration were possible after ...

We present new evidence for dark mafic sediment layers, exposed at impact crater or pit walls as well as on impact crater floors, to embody local sources for the dark aeolian dunes material on Mars. CTX, HiRISE, HRSC and CRISM data prove that those layers have a wider geographical distribution as previously thought. Age determinations of selected source regions led suggest that the exposure tim...

We present the results of experiments on impact craters formed by dropping a steel ball vertically into a container of small glass beads. As the energy of impact increases, we observe a progression of crater morphologies analogous to that seen in craters on the moon. We find that both the diameter and the depth of the craters are proportional to the 1/4 power of the energy. The ratio of crater ...