Present-Day Impact Cratering

Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems, Posted on: Monday, 1 December 2008, 07:28 CST Download full size image

In the 8 December 2006 issue of Science, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) science operations group published a paper regarding two major new results from the red planet:

* the detection of 20 new impact craters that formed on Mars between May 1999 and March 2006, providing the first measure of present-day impact cratering rate on any object in the Solar System; and

* the identification of 2 gully sites at which new, light-toned deposits formed during the past 7 years, hinting at the possibility that liquid water has flowed on the martian surface in these limited areas in this decade.

This image is a colorized view of the Impact Crater in Arabia Terra. The image is a sub-frame of MOC narrow angle camera image S16-01674, obtained on 20 March 2006. The color comes from a look-up table derived from the colors of Mars as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).

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