Background: Gale Crater is located at 5.3°S, 222.3°W (137.7°E) and has a diameter of ~155 km. It has b een a ta rget o f p articular i nterest d ue to the > 5 k m t all m ound o f layered material that occupies the center of the c rater. Gale Crater is currently one of four finalist landing s ites for the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Method: We used visible (CTX, HiRISE, MOC), infrared (THEMI...

Introduction: Previous crater studies of Mercury utilized shadow measurement techniques to determine some crater characteristics [1-5]. Shadow measurements of crater topography yield accurate relative heights, but are limited to craters that have shadows that reach the crater center. Pike [5] collected morphologic characteristics of 316 impact craters on Mercury. Craters were classified into se...

A.1,219 meter (4,000 ft) drill hole in Crater Flat shows the absence of burled Pliocene or Quaternary volcanic rocks, and penetrates a section of Timber Mountain, Paintbrush, and the upper part of the Crater Flat Tuffs, similar to that exposed adjacent-to-Crater Flat. A prominent negative aeromagnetic anomaly between the drill hole and Bare Mountain is attributed to a westward thickening.sectio...

Introduction: Two terrestrial craters of different origins have been selected as field sites for this continuing work: El Elegante Crater, a maar crater in the Pinacate Volcanic Field (PVF) in northern Mexico, formed approximately 150,000 years ago from phrea-tomagmatic explosions [1-2], and Meteor Crater, an impact crater located in central Arizona, formed approximately 50,000 years ago from t...

Introduction: The young Lonar crater, Maharashtra, India [1-3], is a bowl-shaped, almost circular, simple impact crater [4] of relatively small diameter ~1.8 km [5]. The uniqueness of this crater is that it is one of two known terrestrial impact craters excavated on basaltic target rock. The target-rock of this crater is the sub-horizontal Deccan basalt flows (~67 M.y.) [6]. All around the circ...

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 rays radiate from fresh primary craters on the Moon, Mercury, and Mars. On the Moon, they are related to secondary craters [1,2,3], scouring of the surface [2], or deposition of distal deposits [2]. On Mars, they also can be shown to be related to secondary craters (e.g., [4,5]) or blast winds [6,7]. Observations of arcuate uprange rays emanating from the Deep Impact collis...

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...

Certain deep indentations observed in dry coatings are referred to as "craters". They are believed to arise from gradients in the coating surface tension. A mathematical model of surface-tension-gradient-driven flow, using the lubrication approximation for thin layers, is developed to study the formation of craters. The paint is modeled as consisting of an evaporating "solvent" part and a nonvo...