JetLib News

Well, NASA’s Valentine’s date seems to have gone off without a hitch. Last night the Stardust-NExT probe passed within 110 miles of the comet Tempel 1, and snapped plenty of pictures during its rendezvous. The mission’s main objective was to record the results of an experiment conducted by another spacecraft, Deep Impact, which hurled an impactor at Tempel 1 back in 2005. Researchers hoped Stardust would catch a glimpse of the man-made crater.

As Phil Plait writes:

The whole point here was to see the impact crater from 2005, and Stardust was able to do that. It’s difficult to see in these images here, but Pete Schultz, an impact specialist with the mission, said the crater is about 150 meters across and has a central peak, indicating material fell back to the comet. The crater wasn’t as obvious as expected, but is about the right size given the impactor speed, mass, and angle of impact.

Head over to Bad Astronomy for more details, and for a nice animation of the flyby.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell

Source: Stardust Spacecraft Sends Home Close-Ups of a Comet

tetrahedrassface writes “When I was very young, my dad took me on a trip to his parents’ farm. He wanted to show me ‘The Crater.’ We walked a long way through second generation hardwoods and finally stood on the rim of a hole that has no equal in this area. As I grew up, I became more interested in The Crater, and would always tell friends about it. It is roughly 1,200 feet across and 120 feet deep, and has a strange vibe about it. When you walk up to it, you feel like something really big happened here. Either the mother of all caves is down there, or a large object smashed into this place a long, long time ago. I bought aerial photos when I was twelve and later sent images from GIS to a geologist at a local university. He pretty much laughed me out of his office, saying that it was a sinkhole. He did wish me luck, however. It may be sinkhole. Who knows? Last week I borrowed a metal detector and went poking around, and have found the strangest shrapnel pieces I have ever seen. They are composed of a metal that reacts strongly to acids. The largest piece so far reacted with tap water and dish-washing detergent. My second trip today yielded lots of strange new pieces of metal, and hopefully, one day the truth will be known. Backyard science is so much fun. And who knows; if it is indeed a cave, maybe Cerberus resides there.”

Source: The Story of My As-Yet-Unverified Impact Crater

An anonymous reader writes “One of the largest meteorite impacts in the world has been discovered in the South Australian outback by geothermal researchers. It may explain one of the many extinction events in the past 600 million years, and may contain rare and exotic minerals. The crater is said to have been ‘produced by an asteroid six to 12 km across’ — which is really big!”

Source: Giant Impact Crater Found In Australia

Kamil crater, at only about 150 feet wide and 50 feet deep, may not break any size records–but what the Egyptian crater lacks in range it makes up for with cleanliness. In an paper published yesterday in Science, researchers say that its “pristine” impact, spotted in 2009 during a Google Earth survey, makes the crater an ideal model to understand similar impacts.

The best place to see a clean crater? Rocky or icy planets without an atmosphere. Earth’s weather quickly erodes a crater’s structures, making it difficult to determine how exactly a meteorite struck. The Kamil crater, study leader Luigi Folco says, has avoided this fate:

“This crater is really a kind of beauty because it’s so well-preserved that it will tell us a lot about small-scale meteorite impacts on the Earth’s crust…. It’s so nice. It’s so neat. There is something extraordinary about it.” [Space.com]

The crater rises above its desert surroundings, and during visits to the site over the past two years researchers have collected around 5,000 iron meteorites (the dark rocks pictured at right). They estimate that the original meteorite weighed between 5 and 10 tons and smacked the site at 7,800 miles per hour, giving the crater its characteristics, including “rays” that are visible in satellite photos.

These rays, which emanate from the impact site like spokes from the hub of a wheel, are what drew researchers’ attention to the crater, says Folco. While such “rayed craters” are common on the moon and other airless bodies of the solar system, they are exceedingly rare on Earth because erosion and other geological processes quickly erase such evidence. [Science News]

Researchers estimate that the site is relatively young, only about 5,000 years old, given that it must have struck at a time when Egypt’s deserts were in their current arid state.

Images: Museo Nazionale dell’Antartide Universita di Siena

Source: Scientists Use Google Earth to Spot a Meteor Crater in Egypt

An anonymous reader notes the discovery of a 35-million-year-old impact crater in the Timor Sea, northwest of Australia, which helped to usher in a period of significant global cooling. “The new findings, announced today and published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, suggest that the impact could have contributed towards the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet… The minimum size of the dome, which ‘represents elastic rebound doming of the Earth crust triggered by the impact’ is 50 km across, but the full size of the crater could be significantly larger, [lead researcher Andrew Glikson] told Australian Geographic. ‘It would be possibly 100 km.’ From the probable diameter of the crater, Andrew estimates that the asteroid which struck the Timor Sea was between 5 and 10 km in size. This impact coincided with a time of heavy asteroid bombardment globally. Several other craters have been documented from a similar time, including one off the WA coast measuring 120 km in diameter. Another impact structure in Siberia was created by an asteroid 100 km in size.”

Source: Vast Asteroid Crater Found In Timor Sea

coondoggie writes “It has been years in the making but NASA said its Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured a new view of the rim of the planet’s Endeavour crater, perhaps the rover’s ultimate destination. The Mars rover set out for Endeavour in September 2008 after spending two years exploring the Victoria crater. NASA says Endeavour is 13 miles across, some 25 times wider than Victoria crater, and could offer scientists more insight into the red planet’s make-up.”

Source: NASA Mars Rover Spots Its Ultimate Destination

Phrogman writes “The BBC is reporting that deforestation has ‘revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say. The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the last decade.’ If you search Google Maps for ‘Omeonga Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ you will be right in the middle of the suspected crater.”

Source: DR Congo Ring May Be Giant Impact Crater

An anonymous reader writes “An Australian Aboriginal dreaming story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory. From the article: ‘One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.’”

Source: Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater