A new crater on Mars reminds us that our solar system is still very much alive.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that has been orbiting Mars since 2006, uses extremely powerful cameras to observe the Martian surface. The team running the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment (HIRISE Camera) recently released detailed images of the crater.
“A small, recent impact crater,” they posted online succinctly. “That’s it. That’s the whole title.”
It is not So small. Probably small compared to the behemoth of Mars. The upper image is 1 km (0.6 miles) wide, and the zoomed-out view below shows the Martian scene 5 km (3.1 miles) wide.
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It’s unclear when such a closest object, possibly an asteroid, hit Mars, leaving a sizable dent in the red planet’s equatorial region. But you can see traces of ejecta scattered around the impact basin.
The “closest” impact crater discovered in the equatorial region of Mars.
Image credit: NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology / Arizona
Mars is completely covered in craters. NASA estimates there are More than 250,000 The impact crater is about the same size as Arizona’s famous Barringer Crater, which is about 4,000 feet in diameter. There are more than 43,000 craters on Mars that are more than three miles wide.
The Red Planet is closer to our solar system’s asteroid belt, a region filled with millions of asteroids. When they collided with Mars, the Martian atmosphere was only 1% the size of Earth’s atmosphere, meaning these space rocks were unlikely to heat up and break down. What’s more, Mars isn’t nearly geologically dead – Martian earthquakes occur there regularly – but it’s not as active as Earth, a water-covered planet filled with volcanic eruptions. On Mars today, there is no geological or volcanic activity to wash away or mask new craters.
Mix and match speed of light
(Meanwhile, there are only about 120 known impact craters on Earth. That’s because, for hundreds of millions of years, different parts of the Earth’s surface have been covered in molten rock, or moved underneath as the giant plates that make up the crust (tectonic plates) The rock is recovered. Then returned to the surface.)
For us Earthlings, severe asteroid impacts are rare:
– Every day, approximately 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles fall into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up rapidly.
– NASA explains that on average, a “car-sized asteroid” falls and explodes from our skies every year.
– An impact with an object approximately 460 feet in diameter occurs every 10,000 to 20,000 years.
– A “dinosaur-killing” impact on rocks that may have been half a mile or larger in diameter would have occurred on a time scale of 100 million years.
So there’s no reason to live in fear – but there is a reasonable amount of respect for the big space rock out there. After all, with the asteroid deflection technology being created and tested today, we might be able to nudge a threatening asteroid out of its orbit if it were hurtling towards our humble blue planet.