Sentences with phrase «impact basin»

«By comparing the measured craters to the number and spatial distribution of large impact basins on Mercury, we found that they started to accumulate at about the same time, suggesting that the resetting of Mercury's surface was global and likely due to volcanism,» said lead author Dr. Simone Marchi, who has a joint appointment between two of NASA's Lunar Science Institutes, one at the SwRI in Boulder and another at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Combining these new estimates with the fact that there are even larger impact basins on the Moon and other planets, Schultz concludes that protoplanet - sized asteroids may have been common in the early solar system.

Below it the giant impact basin Hellas.

This is a small central section of Hellas Planitia, the largest visible impact basin in our Solar System.

The missions would: return a sample from an icy comet, probe gas giant Saturn, explore the surface of fiery Venus, return a sample from a huge impact basin on the moon, visit asteroids orbiting the sun with Jupiter, repeatedly fly by Jupiter's radiation - soaked volcanic moon Io, and plant a network of geophysical observatories on the moon.

Last year, the Messenger probe — the first mission to Mercury since the 1970s — returned crystal - clear views of the 960 - mile - wide Caloris impact basin, here seen in false color as yellow - orange.

Its charge was simple: Look for signs that Gale crater, a huge impact basin with a mountain at its center, might once have been habitable (for microbes, not...

Scientists haven't always agreed on the size of lunar craters because lava filled many of the biggest impact basins on the side of the moon that faces Earth.

Scientists have explained Sputnik Planitia's youthful appearance by positing that it is an ancient impact basin — a giant crater filled with thick floes of younger ice that, driven by heat seeping up from below, churn and refresh the surface.

In 2012, he and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Geoscience that found compositional evidence for an impact within Procellarum — a type of pyroxene mineral that is found in other, known impact basins such as South Pole — Aitken and is associated with the melting or excavation of mantle rock from an asteroid impact.

In 2013, Chang «e-3, an unmanned lunar mission, touched down on the northern part of the Imbrium basin, one of the most prominent of the lava - filled impact basins visible from Earth.

Early in the formation of our solar system (before 3.9 billion years ago) there was lots of large debris striking the surfaces of the young planets and moons; these older impact basins are larger than the more recent craters.

The oval - looking Argyre impact basin (bottom) appears white due to clouds or frost.

Bright white areas to the south, including the Hellas impact basin at extreme lower right, are covered by carbon dioxide frost.

A 930 - kilometer - wide impact basin perched on the moon's visible edge, Orientale resembles a bull's - eye, with a smooth interior encircled by three rough rings.

The feature sits in the Rembrandt impact basin, the second - largest impact scar on the planet.

The work also suggests — based on the sizes of other impact basins in the Moon, Mars and Mercury — that the early solar system was likely well stocked with protoplanet - sized asteroids.

VOLCANIC TERRAIN During a 2009 flyby, Messenger spotted Rachmaninoff, a 170 - mile - wide, double - ringed impact basin.

This is a photomicrograph of a vesicular green shard from the Onaping Formation of the Sudbury impact basin.

Last month, scientists using instruments on a NASA lunar mission showed that the peak rings within the Orientale impact basin were likely to have formed in a similar way as at Chicxulub.

Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, did find traces of large impact basins comparable to Tombaugh Regio in Dawn's data.

... The SPA basin is the oldest, deepest observable impact basin on the moon and ranks among the largest recognized impact structures in the solar system,» (shown in the image).

These sub-marine, isolated impact basins, which experienced basaltic volcanism and were equipped with their own hydrothermal systems, thus present a new pathway to synthesis and concentration of the stepping stones to life.

The kind of asteroid needed to form the Martian dichotomy would fall in between that size and those of the rocks that formed other large craters, such as the South Pole — Aitken impact basin on the moon and the Hellas Basin in Mars's southern hemisphere, both more than 1,30 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide.

Mars, on the other hand, is thought to have been shaped mostly during the period of primordial accretion and the so - called Late Heavy Bombardment, when asteroids carved out massive impact basins and pushed up huge volcanoes.

The site is also near the northwest rim of the giant impact basin Isidis Planitia.

If the former scenario proves to be the case, the graphite flecks and whiskers may be intact fragments of the meteorite that excavated the giant Serenitatis impact basin near the Apollo 17 landing site.

In 2001, Galileo detected that an asteroid had struck the moon, forming the Valhalla impact basin.

«This is a highly detailed look at the compositional structure of this huge impact basin using modern, cutting - edge data,» said Dan Moriarty, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who led the research while a doctoral student at Brown.

Two new studies on Pluto were published on Wednesday, revealing a controversy about what lies beneath an icy impact basin in the...

Mariner 10 viewed only the eastern (right) portion of this enormous impact basin, under lighting conditions that emphasized shadows and elevation differences rather than brightness and color differences.

This false - color image of Mercury, recently published in Science magazine, shows the great Caloris impact basin, visible in this image as a large, circular, orange feature in the center of the picture.

Its charge was simple: Look for signs that Gale crater, a huge impact basin with a mountain at its center, might once have been habitable (for microbes, not Matt Damon).

Another paper finds that, though Ceres is scarred by many small craters, it tends to lack big impact basins.

At number 1: Was Pluto's frozen heart formed in an ancient impact basin and was it once closer to the north pole?

Below known impact basins, GRAIL found the expected ringlike patterns, but underneath the Procellarum region, the mysterious rectangle emerged.

A composite of several Cassini images shows Titan's varied surface, including possibly a remnant of an old impact basin (large circular feature near the center of Titan's disk).

Although Kargel's research focused on the icy moons of the outer solar system, his interest was piqued when he saw what he thought was a network of sinuous channels meandering through the Argyre impact basin, a region in the southern highlands of the red planet.

Francis Nimmo, the lead author of the second study and an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz, says that in the early solar system very large impacts were common: «Earth's moon is the result of a big impact, Mercury has one giant impact basin, and when you move to the outer solar system, Uranus's rotation axis is tilted because of an impact.

Maps of Earth are sharp in detail, as are those for Mars, showing mountain peaks and impact basins in high relief.

At 2,500 kilometers across, the SPA is the largest impact basin on the Moon and perhaps the largest in the solar system.

From the images, scientists say that it appears that, contrary to what was previously believed, the lander did survive the landing in one piece and is located 5 km from the centre of its targeted touchdown zone of Isidis Planitia (an impact basin close to the equator).

But this initial study helps raise the possibility that some of the original mantle mineralogy, if excavated, may be preserved in the Moon's largest impact basin.

The researchers say this indicates an upper crust made of a mixture of rock and ice — in which small craters could be carved — supported by a more viscous mantle of ice lower down, which would allow the biggest impact basins to relax away with time, like silly putty returning to its original shape.

For decades, scientists have debated the significance of these rings, which are found around the largest impact basins on the moon, Mars, and Earth.

They also say that an impact basin on the other side of the dwarf planet, a 280 - kilometer - wide area called Kerwan, may have sent shockwaves through Ceres and triggered the eruption.

There are localised increases caused by mass concentrations, or mascons, associated with the impact basins Imbrium, Crisium, Serenitatis and Orientale.

Sputnik Planitia's unique attributes have spurred a number of scenarios for its formation, all of which identify the feature as an impact basin, a depression created by a smaller body striking Pluto at extremely high speed.