Skip to comments.Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Stickney Crater
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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Poor little moon. That must have smarted when it hit.
That’s quite a dent in the old generation ship.
Once again, real moons and satellites are made of rock and don’t reflect light all over creation like that. That thing is obviously metallic, obviously made of metallic strakes, and obviously artificial, some sort of a gigantic ancient space station.
The end of life on Earth will involve something like this.
The end of Earth will take longer.
Ew. Looks like streaked bird poop.
Lots of things, including the terrestrial planets, have a lot of metal, including in the crust, which on Earth is mostly silicon and aluminum. IOW, uh, no. It’s an old speculation, and even Sagan suggested it (as his own idea?), but there’s literally zero evidence for it that isn’t also evidence for a prosaic, mundane origin.
I’m amazed by the large photo.
Resembles a snail to me. :)
:’) Depends of course on how big the bolide will be; anything a mile in diameter or more exceeds the energy of all the world’s nuclear weapons combined. The Chicxulub object was approximately 10 miles across, which means, tenfold larger in each dimension, or 1000 times as massive, iow, all the nukes times one thousand. Much of the surface-dwelling animal life would succumb in a few hours, just from the rise in temperature of the entire atmosphere.
But hey, stuff like that is why they call me Mister Sunshine.
It’s an ill-kept secret that Russian penetrating radar has shown rectangular interior spaces.
Do birds eat snails? :’)
I don’t know about you, but that looks like frozen water to me. If we could get there, we could probably live there. Just drill down into it and hollow it out, and take our oxygen-rich trees and plants with us. The Earth is one of the few rocks in the Solar System that has a molten core, don’t you know.
Phobos and Deimos are small, and are obviously either captured asteroids, or were formed from ejecta of impacts on Mars. Phobos has been speculated to be 25-30 percent empty space, iow, a pile of aggregated debris, basically a pile of rubble based on a one or a few largest pieces — much like every other asteroid that has been studied from close up.
The radar study of Phobos was MARSIS, and was by the ESA,, not the Russians.
There was a Russian (alleged) scientist who started claiming back in the 1950s that Phobos was moving irregularly. Naturally, at that time the mass of Mars wasn’t accurately known, and neither was the mass of Phobos for that matter. Here’s fringe website Rense’ page on this:
And oddly enough, Wikipedia has the inside scoop:
That’s VERY Dramatic Photo! Thanks.
Water will come in handy for space settlers, someday — broken down to build oxygen for the atmosphere, as well as used for growing food, and showering off. The Gerard K. O’Neill vision of rotating half-glassed (smirk) cylinders to provide simulated 1-G conditions might become home to literally billions someday — assuming a foolproof way is devised of avoiding punctures or worse due to naturally occuring space debris.
Martian moons: Phobos -- The team concluded that Phobos is likely to contain large voids, which makes it less likely to be a captured asteroid. Its composition and structural strength seem to be inconsistent with the capture scenario. It is possible that Phobos formed in situ at Mars, from ejecta from impacts on the Martian surface, or from the remnants of a previous moon which had formed from the Martian accretion disc and subsequently collided with a body from the asteroid belt. Data from the Mars Express OMEGA spectrometer suggests Phobos has a primitive composition, so primitive materials must have been available for accretion during its formation. The circular orbit suggests that Phobos formed in situ whilst analysis of the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer data from Mars Express also points towards in situ formation but does not rule out the possibility that Phobos is a captured achondrite-like meteor.
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