Goat Paddock in northern Western Australia is a *5 km-diameter impact crater of Eocene age excavated in gently dipping Proterozoic sandstones. Roughly radial gorges formed by post-impact erosion provide cross-sectional views of the wall and rim zone. The predominant structural theme is one of synclinal rim folding with broad zones in which bedrock strata were deformed by impact to steep, vertic...

Gravity data of Ceres returned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Dawn spacecraft is consistent with a lower density crust of variable thickness overlying a higher density mantle. Crustal thickness variations can affect the long-term, postimpact modification of impact craters on Ceres. Here we show that the unusual morphology of the 280 km diameter crater Kerwan may result f...

The trajectory of the impacting asteroid is another issue of considerable debate and still unresolved. Historically, circular plan views of impact craters confounded many investigators who assumed a circular crater requires a vertical impact. They wondered why more craters are not elliptical. Gilbert and Barringer both realized that 45° impacts are the most probable trajectories for meteoritic ...

The Chicxulub crater is the only wellpreserved peak-ring crater on Earth and linked, famously, to the K-T or K-Pg mass extinction event. For the first time, geologists have drilled into the peak ring of that crater in the International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (IODP-ICDP) Expedition 364. The Chicxulub impact event, the environmental calam...

Lunar impact craters are important for studying lunar surface morphology because they are the most typical morphological units of the Moon. Impact crater descriptive indices can be used to describe morphological features and thus provide direct evidence for both the current state and evolution history of the Moon. Current description methods for lunar impact craters are predominantly qualitativ...

Introduction: The geometries of simple impact craters reflect the properties of the target materials, and the diverse range of fluidized morphologies observed in Martian ejecta blankets are controlled by the near surface composition and the climate at the time of impact. Using the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data set, quantitative information about the strength of the upper crust and the dynam...

Unlike other types of fluidized ejecta impact craters, Martian double-layered ejecta (DLE) craters rarely have secondary impact craters [1]. In our continued effort to understand DLE and other types of Martian fluidized ejecta craters we have examined recently acquired THEMIS images, and found two exceptionally fresh DLE craters that include well-developed secondary crater fields. One of these ...

High temperature impact melt breccias from the Rochechouart (France) meteorite crater record a magnetization component with antipodal, normal and reverse polarities. The corresponding paleomagnetic pole for this component lies between the 220 Ma and 210 Ma reference poles on the Eurasian apparent polar wander path, consistent with the 214±8 Ma Ar/Ar age of the crater. Late Triassic tectonic rec...

[1] We report on numerical modeling results of postimpact cooling of craters with diameters of 30, 100, and 180 km in an early Martian environment, with and without the presence of water. The effects of several variables, such as ground permeability and the presence of a crater lake, were tested. Host rock permeability is the main factor affecting fluid circulation and lifetimes of hydrothermal...

[1] High-resolution images from Chandrayaan-1 Terrain Mapping Camera and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera reveal landslides and gully formation on the interior wall of a 7 km-diameter simple crater emplaced in Schrödinger basin on the farside of the Moon. These features occur on the steep upper crater wall, where the slope is ~35 . The gullies show a typical alcove-channel-fan morphology. So...