A pretty cool result came out of Cornell University this week, showing that Mars was struck by a pair of ancient asteroids that caused massive tsunamis. Not only is it the first evidence of a tsunami event on another world, but it proves that Mars once had a large ocean. The study looked at ancient shorelines between the lowlands and highlands of Mars, where the ocean-land boundary would have been. Two massive impacts, a few million years apart, extended the shorelines and caused turmoil with the Martian climate at the time. “About 3.4 billion years ago, a big meteorite impact triggered...
NASA has been zeroing in on certain features of dwarf planet Ceres and looked at them in more detail. Here are the most surprising as well as what we know so far. There are a few other great videos in this playlist, but the first one gives a great summary of what has been seen so far. The most surprising and interesting feature of Ceres in my opinion has been the Occator crater. With the enigmatic bright spots that have been observed since the Dawn spacecraft approached Ceres, we are seeing them in finer detail than ever before, and we...
Cryovolcano is a cool word, literally and figuratively. You hear about it a lot when talking about solar system moons like Enceladus, and it’s one of those words that would make a heck of a great Hollywood disaster movie title, like ‘Sharknado’ or ‘Armageddon.’ I do not, however, endorse either of those movies, they were both terrible. At any rate, a real cryovolcano seems like an interesting thing. It’s a volcano in the sense that it looks a little like a mountain and spews out material when the pressure builds from beneath the surface, but it’s not your traditional Earth-like volcano...
The moons of Mars, aptly named for the sons of the god of war, Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Panic) are more like asteroids than the larger moons we generally associate with planets. The moons are only 22 Km (phobos) and 12 Km (deimos) in diameter, and orbit their planet is 7 hours and 30 hours respectively. The larger moon Phobos is moving toward its planet by almost 7 feet every year, due to the massive gravitational forces it feels from Mars. As it moves closer than its current distance of 6,000 Km, tidal forces from Mars will slowly increase,...
We tend to think of the Moon as a boring old rock. “We’ve been there, so we know all there is to know, onto the next one.” But the Moon still holds secrets, and has its surprises. The formation of the Moon through collision of proto-Earth with a Mars-sized object is an idea that can give us a lot of insight into how the Earth formed and what raw materials we started with. But of course to study it we have to see what the Moon is made of in addition to what the Earth’s rocks contain. In recent years,...
Around 470 Million years ago, two asteroids collided in the asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter. This sent fragments everywhere, and millions of years later these fragments moved into the inner solar system, many of which struck the Earth as meteorites. Recently, in Jämtland county, Sweden, a team of geophysicists has identified a pair of impact craters that were formed at the same time, likely from two separate impactors. One of the craters is a massive 7.5 Km across, while the other is smaller at 700 meters. This is the first time a double impactor has been scientifically confirmed on Earth....
The Moon has clearly seen some stuff. It’s visibly heavily cratered across it’s surface, which has remained unchanged since it’s surface solidified 4.2 Billion years ago. Think about that – the Moon has been the same, with the exception of cratering, for 4 Billion years. This is a stark contrast to the Earth, whose erosion and tectonic activity cause the crust to change on scales of a few hundred million years. Astronomers have worked hard to learn about the early solar system by looking at the Moon and its cratering patterns. Most of the visible craters on the Moon are...
We are fairly confident about the idea that the Moon formed when a Mars sized object hit the young Earth over 4 Billion years ago. The resulting debris cloud condensed to form the Moon, giving the Earth a surprisingly large Moon for its size. Next to Charon and Pluto, the Earth’s Moon is the largest relative to the size of its planet. It’s also the third largest of all moons in the Solar System, next to Ganymede and Titan, #1 and #2 respectively. but there is one problem with this theory of the Moons formation: The Earth and Moon are...
We have found evidence of ancient impacts all across the Earth, from the famous Chixulub crater in Mexico to the Sudbury Basin a little bit closer to my home. From Space the remains look nothing like craters, millions of years of sediment and growth hide the massive regions from obvious detection, but signs remain of these massive events, even after millions of years. This week, what is possibly the largest impact crater basin ever discovered has been found in central Australia. And it is thought to originate from the breakup of a massive 400 Km asteroid into two pieces that...
With the MESSENGER probe set to crash into Mercury this month, it’s nice to look back on some of the finest data that it gathered during its tenure orbiting the smallest planet of the solar system. The image shows the Caloris Basin, the largest impact basin on Mercury and one of the largest in the solar system. The result of a massive asteroid impact during the early days of the solar system, the 1,500 Km wide crater was filled with lava aeons ago when Mercury was geologically active (seen in orange). Large impacts have punctured the surface of the basin since...
