Fresh 3-kilometer diameter meteor impact crater on Mars


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[?]dudebro_fistbump 119 points

1 dayago

Define 'very fresh'. Are we talking days, years or eons?

 

Here's what the HIRISE Twitter account when asked a similar question:

@ke7dkg @BadAstronomer The rim is still ?sharp,? meaning it hasn?t eroded too much, but could be on order of thousands of years or more.

 

[?]FlyingTinOpener 8 points

1 day ago

In vast majority of asteroid impacts, the ridiculously high velocity of the asteroid completely overpowers the size and shape of the object itself when determining the shape of the impact crater. Quite often the size of the crater can be a 100 times the size of the impacting object itself. It's why most craters are spherical.

Non-spherical craters like this one happen when the impacting object flies in maybe a few degrees above the horizontal and hits the surface at a very shallow angle.

The shape you should really be looking at here is the outer perimeter of the crater. Notice that it still has a pretty round-ish shape but the top left corner is slightly tapered. What probably happened here is that the asteroid impacted the surface at a very shallow angle at this top left corner, and then blew out the dirt towards the bottom and right.

http://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1k7kex/very_fresh_3kilometer_diameter_impact_crater_on/

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