Synopsis: The Loch Leven basin (56° 12' N, 3° 23' W) in the Midland Valley of Scotland has been identified as the site of the primary impact of a low-angle oblique impact event dating from the end of the Carboniferous. Together with two further downrange structures, it forms a chain of craters which appear to have been produced by fragments of a large asteroid which disintegrated on impact. Top...

Microtektites, small blobs of ejecta formed in the shock melt and vapor plume of an impact, can be dispersed far from the source crater only if the impact is violent enough for the ejecta plume to pierce the atmosphere; they are therefore formed in far smaller (and more numerous) impact events on Mars than on Venus and Earth, which have thicker atmospheres. Microtektite abundances from the Chic...

Introduction: Central pit craters are an unusual class of impact crater seen most commonly on the icy Galilean satellites and Mars. They are characterized by terraced rims and flattened floors with a pit at or near the center (see Fig 1). Their association with ice-rich surfaces has led most hypotheses for the origins of central pits to rely on the volatility or weakness of water ice [e.g. 1, 2...

En route to Endeavour crater, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity embarked on a short but significant campaign at Santa Maria crater during sols 2450–2551. Santa Maria crater is a relatively young impact crater, approximately 100 m in diameter and 11–17 m deep. Opportunity performed detailed analyses on several ejecta blocks and completed an extensive imaging campaign around the crater. Many...

Cross crater is a 65 km impact crater, located in the Noachian highlands of the Terra Sirenum region of Mars (30°S, 158°W), which hosts aluminum phyllosilicate deposits first detected by the Observatoire pour la Minéralogie, L’Eau, les Glaces et l’Activitié (OMEGA) imaging spectrometer on Mars Express. Using high-resolution data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we examine Cross crater’s ba...

Introduction: Crater detection algorithms (CDA) have greatly evolved in the last decade and are detecting much smaller structures with higher performances [1-3] which is permitting their use in the construction and upgrade of crater catalogues, namely for Mars [4] and Phobos [5]. Although improvements are still required in the CDA, namely for detecting metric craters in diameter with the same h...

Approximately 470 million years ago one of the largest cosmic catastrophes occurred in our solar system since the accretion of the planets. A 200-km large asteroid was disrupted by a collision in the Main Asteroid Belt, which spawned fragments into Earth crossing orbits. This had tremendous consequences for the meteorite production and cratering rate during several millions of years following t...

Introduction: Lunar concentric craters represent an anomalous type of impact structures on the Moon [1]. The concentric crater Archytas G in mare Frigoris has first been catalogued as a concentric crater in [2]. According to Fig. 1, it is located on top of a large lunar intrusive dome, termed Ar1 in [3]. The dome Ar1 is the only lunar dome known to date with a concentric crater on its surface. ...