pic Fresh 3-kilometer diameter meteor impact crater on Mars

[Crisp]

Image source

 

Is that water in the bottom?

[ahhell]

A bit of context would be nice.

[firey]

A bit of context would be nice.

 

Your momma is so fat.. that when she jumped for joy... she created a crater on mars!

[Growled Member]

A bit of context would be nice.

I agree. I can't tell anything with seeing things to scale.

[SALSN]

So does "fresh" mean within the last 10 years or the last 10,000 years?

[Arachno 1D]

[?]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.

 

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[?]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/

[neufuse Veteran]

looks like mars has sinkholes too..... :rofl:  that looks so much like one

[Kriz]

A bit of context would be nice.

Meteor crash into planet = crater :p

[ILikeTobacco]

Meteor crash into planet = crater :p

Did you just call his mom a meteor!?