amanfrommars lost his home.
NASA spots new Mars meteorite crater
NASA has captured the best ever before and after shots depicting a meteorite strike. The strike in question happened on Mars in March 2012 but was only spotted earlier this year. The long wait came because while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter beams back pictures of the Red Planet daily, not all are immediately examined. …
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Monday 26th May 2014 11:26 GMT MrT
Re: mmmh...
Check the HiRISE picture link - the article says the main impact is about 150ft/48m across, (a couple of brontosauri) - the two big ones would occupy a space about as big as a football pitch... smaller impacts across half a dozen or so. Looks fairly head on since its almost circular.
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Monday 26th May 2014 16:02 GMT Steve the Cynic
Re: mmmh...
"Looks fairly head on since its almost circular"
For impact craters this line of reasoning is more or less complete bulldinkey. Impact craters for all but the shallowest impact angles are round because the crater is caused by an *explosion* whose effects are almost completely independent of the angle of impact.
Unless you are talking about the shot pattern of the array of craters. I'd give you that, sort of.
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Monday 26th May 2014 17:47 GMT MrT
Re: mmmh...
It seems that way since the picture shows a fairly even spread of smaller points - there doesn't seem to be a pattern, though possibly more to the lower part of the image, and given the scale it looks like stuff has stayed fairly close. It might be the biggest impact observed, but it's nothing like the Arizona crater.
However, NASA won't have imaged it using HiRISE at the time - two years or so of erosion will have softened things. The report mentions evidence of nearby landslips that they attribute to the shock of the impact.
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Tuesday 27th May 2014 16:48 GMT Rick Giles
Re: mmmh...
"We need something for scale.
Something like, I don't know... Washington DC, with the crater centered on the Capitol.
It might be the only way to get funding to find a way to prevent us going the way of the Velociraptor."
Most of us Americans wouldn't give two shits if DC got obliterated by a meteor. We'd probably even party.
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Monday 26th May 2014 19:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
OMG! will you just look at the yellow crater to the right of your post!
Of course the so-called "independent experts" [called by who?] will claim its natural, that it's merely twinned uplift peaks offset from the true centre with a collapsed rim to the south catching the low angle light, but if your so BLIND that you cant see THE FACE then may be its rite that the LIZARD PEOPLE WON?
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Monday 26th May 2014 19:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
>> beams back pictures of the Red Planet daily, not all are immediately examined.
Nice to know that the richness of digital cameras also afflicts NASA - I too have an ever increasing pile of snaps that I just know I'm going to get around to sorting through Real Soon Now.
(of course NASA has a finite window for capture before the orbiter fails so it makes sense to blaze away ahead of digestion, let alone having the chance to find transient phenomena like this. Whereas when my camera fails [i.e. gets dropped] it'll be replaced the next day by something that lets me be even sillier. The hi-res HUD camera (step-child of "Glass") will be the final tar baby)