Images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor satellites show dry, cracked surfaces within Martian craters. Previously thought to have been caused by subsurface permafrost contractions, it’s now believed these parched surfaces indicate the remains of dried lake beds. Similar to features found in dry lake beds on Earth, the cracks on…
Tag: crater
Making a Splash
A recent photo taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows a young impact crater in amazing detail, its half-mile-wide interior littered with fused piles of melted rock and encircled by a spray of dark streamers – the “splash” of melted subsurface material from the impact. Boulders and smaller chunks of rock are scattered…
All About Abedin
This image from the MESSENGER spacecraft shows the crater Abedin, recently named after Bangladeshi painter Zainul Abedin. The 68-mile-wide crater exhibits a central peak structure and is surrounded by lines of smaller craters, most likely caused by the ejected debris from the initial impact. Most of the features on Mercury have been named after the…
Revisiting Victoria
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of Victoria Crater on July 18, 2009, with the onboard HiRISE high-definition camera. Victoria Crater was the site of the Opportunity rover’s 2006-2007 investigation. Craters like these are great targets for the rover team because the exposed rock along their edges offers valuable information about Mars’ geologic history….
Rhea View
A fascinating bit of work by Gordan Ugarkovic, this is a brief false-color animation of 950-mile-wide Rhea, second-largest moon of Saturn. Rhea is very reflective, indicating that it is made up of a lot of water ice, and is also heavily cratered (clearly evident here.) Water ice behaves like rock at the low temperatures that…
Dark Side of the Moon
As a matter of fact there IS a dark side of the moon, and it’s NOT all dark. The recently-launched LCROSS orbiter proves it too, in this photo taken during its lunar gravity-assist orbit which will take it around the Earth several times before finally impacting the moon on October 9. This image of the…
Final Frame
This haunting photo is the last image sent back by Japan’s KAGUYA probe before it crashed into the lunar surface at the end of its mission on June 10, 2009. A tiny sliver of sunlight illuminates the rocky rim of a crater as the probe’s high-definition camera stares into the pitch black lunar shadows below….
Craternator
A large-scale crater rides the terminator between day and night on Dione, a 700-mile-wide moon of Saturn. The moon’s signature “wispy lines” can be seen on the sunlit side. These are long fractures in the moon’s surface, exposed ice-covered cliffs hundreds of feet high. Scientists believe they indicate past tectonic activity, or possibly the…
Dividing Line
At some moment between May of 2003 and September of 2007 a cluster of meteorites struck the Martian sands, excavating craters and blasting the rusty dust away to reveal the dark underlying surface layers. Most likely the result of one object that broke up in the thin atmosphere of Mars, its pieces landing near…
Painting a Portrait of Mercury
Previously unknown before MESSENGER’s second flyby on October 6, 2008, the Rembrandt Crater is a young impact basin on the surface of Mercury. It is approximately 430 miles wide…large enough to span the distance from Washington, DC to Boston. Of course, “young” is a relative term here; the basin is estimated to be 3.9 billion…
Do You Heart Mars?
Well, Mars hearts you. This 1.25-mile-long crater was photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on February 26, 2008. It lies on the western edge of the Hydaspis Chaos region, an area of jumbled depressions thought to be caused by the sudden release of groundwater. Click to see a larger shot of the area. Other heart-shaped…
A Fresh Wound
This image from the HiRISE camera on the MRO shows an impact crater that is estimated to have been formed some time between February and July of 2005. This feature is in an equatorial highland region of Mars. The colors here are not true to life…they indicate material composition and density more than actual…
Lights in the Dark 