Latest Impact crater Stories

PARIS (AFP) -- Astronomers say they have identified a place on the Moon that lies in permanent sunlight and close to regions suspected to hold water ice: in short, an ideal location for a tentative lunar colony. The spot is located on a highland close to the lunar north pole, between three large impact craters called Peary, Hermite and Rozhdestvensky, they report in Thursday's issue of Nature, the British weekly science journal. The temperature there is estimated to range between minus 40 and...

ESA -- In orbit for three and a half years now, ESA's smallest Earth Observation satellite is making a big contribution to science, a workshop heard this week. Proba applications range from studying land vegetation to water quality monitoring, assessing productivity of Italian vineyards, even helping hunt for meteorite impact craters. ESA's Proba microsatellite is about the same size and shape as a washing machine. It was launched on 22 October 2001 as a one-year technology demonstrator,...

Chicago -- Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago have explained how a globe-encircling residue formed in the aftermath of the asteroid impact that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs. The study, which will be published in the April issue of the journal Geology, draws the most detailed picture yet of the complicated chemistry of the fireball produced in the impact. The residue consists of sand-sized droplets of hot liquid that condensed from...

The detection of methane on Mars has generated a lot of speculation about what could possibly be producing it. Is it coming out of active volcanoes? Maybe the methane results from some geologic or chemical process we don't yet understand. Or, since much of the methane on Earth is produced by biology, perhaps the faint whiffs of methane point to the existence of present-day life on Mars.Astrobiology Magazine -- The detection of methane on Mars has generated a lot of speculation about what...

Arizona -- The iron meteorite that blasted out Meteor Crater almost 50,000 years ago was traveling much slower than has been assumed, University of Arizona Regents' Professor H. Jay Melosh and Gareth Collins of the Imperial College London report in the cover article of Nature (March 10). "Meteor Crater was the first terrestrial crater identified as a meteorite impact scar, and it's probably the most studied impact crater on Earth," Melosh said. "We were astonished to discover...

University of Arizona scientists have discovered why Eros, the largest near-Earth asteroid, has so few small craters.Arizona -- When the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission orbited Eros from February 2000 to February 2001, it revealed an asteroid covered with regolith -- a loose layer of rocks, gravel and dust -- and embedded with numerous large boulders. The spacecraft also found places where the regolith apparently had slumped, or flowed downhill, exposing fresh surface...