Photos of the Day: Photos of the day 04/27
Photos of the Day: Photos of the day 04/26
Photos of the Day: Photos of the Day 04/25
In Pictures: Where Your Clothes Come From
In Pictures: Millenium Development Goals: GLOBAL PROGRESS REPORT
Photos of the Day: Photos of the Day 04/24
In Pictures: Mexico's Economy
Photos of the Day: Photos of the day 04/23
Meteor Crater is one of the youngest and best-preserved impact craters on Earth. The crater formed roughly 50,000 years ago when a 30-meter-wide, iron-rich meteor weighing 100,000 tons struck the Arizona desert at an estimated 20 kilometers per second. The resulting explosion exceeded the combined force of today's nuclear arsenals and created a 1.1-kilometer-wide, 200-meter-deep crater. Meteor Crater is a simple crater since it has no central peak or rim terraces.
This space radar image shows the Roter Kamm impact crater in southwest Namibia. The crater rim is seen in the lower center of the image as a radar-bright, circular feature. Geologists believe the crater was formed by a meteorite that collided with Earth approximately 5 million years ago.
Two of the 20 new impact craters determined by the Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera science operations team to have formed between May 1999 and March 2006 occur at a location that the narrow-angle camera imaged previously. This is surprising given that the narrow-angle camera, with its 3-kilometer-wide (1.9-mile-wide) field of view, has only covered about 5.2 percent of the Martian surface. One of the two craters that formed where the camera had already taken a narrow-angle image is featured here.
This NASA Ames spacecraft is a small 'secondary payload' spacecraft that traveled with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) satellite to the moon. As the spacecraft approached the moon's south pole, the upper stage separated, and then impacted a crater in the south pole area. A plume containing ice water from the upper stage crash was observed by NASA in 2009.
This image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows 'Victoria crater,' an impact crater at Meridiani Planum, near the equator of Mars. The crater is approximately 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter. It has a distinctive scalloped shape to its rim, caused by erosion and downhill movement of crater wall material.
An enormous crater marks the site where the A-2 test stand was being built in 1964 at the NASA Mississippi Test Operations facility
Lying just south of the Tropic of Capricorn and to the west of Alice Springs, Australia, Gosses Bluff Crater in the MacDonnell Ranges stands out as a prominent circular feature. All the terrestrial planets experienced an early episode of massive asteroidal bombardment, and many of them, for example the Moon, retain a clear record of that bombardment. Normal processes of erosion have erased all trace of this catastrophic episode in the Earth's history. Only a small number of younger impact craters are known to exist and Gosses Bluff is one of them. The original crater was about 20 kilometers in diameter.
No, satellite images do not show any craters in Egypt’s Western Desert that can account for the mysterious “Desert Glass” found there, Dr. Farouk El-Baz had just finished telling filmmakers interested in exploring the origins of the yellow-green glass fragments in late February 2006. After the cameras stopped rolling, El-Baz sorted through image after image of the Western Desert when he came across a ring of rocks surrounded by traces of an outer ring: the telltale markings of an impact crater. The massive crater measured 31 kilometers across and was large enough to contain 70,000 football fields; the site was a very probable source of the glass.
This artist's concept illustrates how a massive collision of objects, perhaps as large as the planet Pluto, smashed together to create the dust ring around the nearby star Vega. New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope indicate the collision took place within the last one million years. Astronomers think that embryonic planets smashed together, shattered into pieces, and repeatedly crashed into other fragments to create ever finer debris.
This photo showing the Manicouagan Reservoir in Quebec, Canada, was photographed by the STS-111 crewmembers aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Manicouagan Reservoir marks the site of an impact crater, 60 miles wide, which was formed 212 million years ago when a meteorite crashed into this area. Scientists say that over millions of years the many advancing and retreating glaciers and other erosional processes have worn down the crater.
The most likely explanation for the gamma-ray burst GRB050709 is that it was produced by a collision of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole. Such a collision would result in the formation of a black hole (or a larger black hole), and could generate a beam of high-energy particles that could account for the powerful gamma-ray pulse as well as observed radio, optical and X-ray afterglows.
A large body of scientific evidence now exists that support the hypothesis that a major asteroid or comet impact occurred in the Caribbean region at the boundary of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods in Earth's geologic history. Such an impact is suspected to be responsible for the mass extinction of many floral and faunal species, including the large dinosaurs, that marked the end of the Cretaceous period. The geohydrological feature of Northwestern Yucatan, was discovered through NASA Ames remote sensing technology and represents a prime candidate for the impact site of a global catastrophic event.
The Cassini probe captured the first high-resolution glimpse of the bright trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Iapetus. This false-color mosaic shows the entire hemisphere of Iapetus, 912 miles across, visible from Cassini on the outbound leg of its encounter with the two-toned moon in Sept. 2007.
A dent caused by debris impact is seen on the Space Shuttle after landing in 1990.
This artist's concept gives us a look at the Deep Impact mission's moment of impact and the forming of the crater. Deep Impact was a NASA mission intended to study the composition of a comet interior by striking the body with an impactor and observing the results.
This artist's concept shows delicate greenish crystals sprinkled throughout the violent core of a pair of colliding galaxies. The white spots represent a thriving population of stars of all sizes and ages. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope detected more than 20 bright and dusty galactic mergers like the one depicted here, all teeming with the tiny gem-like crystals.
The impact of an asteroid or comet several hundred million years ago left scars in the landscape that are still visible in this spaceborne radar image of an area in the Sahara Desert of northern Chad. The concentric ring structure is the Aorounga impact crater, with a diameter of about 10.5 miles. The original crater was buried by sediments, which were then partially eroded to reveal the current ring-like appearance.
This artist's concept shows a catastrophic asteroid impact with the early Earth. An impact with a 300-mile-diameter asteroid would effectively sterilize the planet. The Earth may have experienced such gigantic impacts in its youth, but fortunately today there are no projectiles this large to threaten our planet.
Photos of the Day: Photos of the day 04/27
Photos of the Day: Photos of the day 04/26
Photos of the Day: Photos of the Day 04/25
In Pictures: Where Your Clothes Come From
In Pictures: Millenium Development Goals: GLOBAL PROGRESS REPORT
Photos of the Day: Photos of the Day 04/24
In Pictures: Mexico's Economy
Photos of the Day: Photos of the day 04/23
Scientists say they found the oldest meteor impact crater yet discovered, caused by a rock that, if it hit Earth today, would wipe out all higher life.
The world's oldest meteorite crater —a giant impact zone more than 62 miles wide — has been found in Greenland, scientists say.
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