Posted on 01/18/2013 3:13:45 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered both the Red Planet's moons in 1877. Over 9 kilometers across, Stickney is nearly half the diameter of Phobos itself, so large that the impact that blasted out the crater likely came close to shattering the tiny moon. This stunning, enhanced-color image of Stickney and surroundings was recorded by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as it passed within some six thousand kilometers of Phobos in March of 2008. Even though the surface gravity of asteroid-like Phobos is less than 1/1000th Earth's gravity, streaks suggest loose material slid down inside the crater walls over time. Light bluish regions near the crater's rim could indicate a relatively freshly exposed surface. The origin of the curious grooves along the surface is mysterious but may be related to the crater-forming impact.
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NO WAY would I dare name a big hole after my wife.
I was actually startled as it started to load, no joke, and I’d seen similar pics before, just not in a Demille closeup. :’)
Interesting Place.
Just wait till the Timeshare developers get a hold of it!
I already see a place for a large, rock-lined spa!
Did she pick your FR nick? ;’)
Probably some international authority will phobid it.
I miss Carl Sagan. He was one of the ultimate visionaries of the last century (the 20th century). I read all of his books, and they were very profound. And he died relatively young. What a shame. What a waste of a Clear Spirit.
Probably by declaring Martial Law?
The impact delivered a great deal of energy, and there’s a lot of metal (or quartz?) in the body. The dull-looking part of the surface is covered at least a meter deep in micrometeorites and ejecta dust from larger impacts. This suggests that these craters are fairly recent, but as the age of the moon is far from agreed-upon, there’s no way to estimate an actual age for the two large craters shown.
I think I’ve dated one or two — or at least I felt the fear.
No doubt that got its start during some Arean movement.
The lines look like the result of the lowest-velocity ejecta merely rolling across the surface; in any impact, some goes up and comes back down, some barely leaves the surface, some escapes.
A Celestial Collision · Alaska Science Forum · February 10, 1983 · Larry Gedney · Posted on 09/15/2004 9:04:28 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv -- Early in the evening of June 18, 1178, a group of men near Canterbury, England, stood admiring the sliver of a new moon hanging low in the west. In terms they later described to a monk who recorded their sighting, "Suddenly a flaming torch sprang from the moon, spewing fire, hot coals and sparks." In continuing their description of the event, they reported that "The moon writhed like a wounded snake and finally took on a blackish appearance"... [P]lanetary scientist Jack Hartung of the State University of New York... gathered enough clues to suggest that a large asteroid... might have smacked into the moon just over the horizon on the back side. To test his suspicion, Hartung went to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and inspected Russian and American photographs of the moon's back side. Sure enough, in just the right place, he found a remarkably fresh crater, 12 miles across and twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. From it radiated white splatter marks for hundreds of miles... Such an impact, reason astrophysicists, would set the moon to ringing like a gong for thousands of years... At Texas' McDonald Observatory, astronomers Odile Calame and J. Derral Mulholland of the University of Texas find that the surface of the moon moves back and forth fully 80 feet! Such an oscillation clearly implies a collision with something large, sometime within the not-too-distant past, probably within the memory of mankind. The problem is that there is no way to peg the date exactly at 1178.
My guess is that the shiny flowing looking streaks are molten glass which slopped over the sides.
Dat’s Demos Atrocious pun I ever hoid!
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