What are impact craters a result of?

Craters produced by the collision of a meteorite with the Earth (or another planet or moon) are called impact craters. The high-speed impact of a large meteorite compresses, or forces downward, a wide area of rock. The pressure pulverizes the rock.

What variables affect the shape and size of the crater?

The size and shape of a crater depend on several factors:

• the mass of the impacting object;
• the density of the impacting object;
• the velocity of the impacting object; and.
• the geology (type of rock) of the surface the object strikes.

How does the height an object is dropped affect the size of the crater it leaves in sand flour?

The greater an object’s velocity, the larger its impact crater. When dropped from a given height, the greater the mass, the larger the crater. When dropped from a given height, the greater the volume, the larger the crater.

How does the size of an object affect the size of an impact crater?

Such a high-speed impact produces a crater that is approximately 20 times larger in diameter than the impacting object. Smaller planets have less gravitational “pull” than large planets; impactors will strike at lower speeds. The greater the mass of the impactor, the greater the size of crater.

What is the meaning of a impact crater?

An impact crater is a depression in the surface of a planet, moon, or other solid body in the Solar System or elsewhere, formed by the hypervelocity impact of a smaller body.

How does the angle of impact affect the crater size and or shape?

Effect of the impact angle on crater size: Crater size decreases proportional to the sinus of the impact angle α . This decrease is more pronounced for stronger materials.

Why are impact craters always round?

The short answer is that the energy involved in an impact is so huge that when the impactor hits the ground, it explodes like a bomb, rather than just denting the surface like a rock thrown into mud. Explosions are generally symmetric, so the resulting crater from most impacts is circular.

What is the crater collapse factor?

According to Geological Implications of Impacts of Large Asteroids and Comets on the Earth (Amazon link), the collapse factor is a factor that accounts for an enlargement of the crater, Terrestrial impact craters 10 km in diameter have all been enlarged by collapse of a transient cavity produced by the impact.

How do you determine crater size?

1. Crater depth can be calculated from the shadow length as before.
2. Upload the image into HiView and use the measuring tool to.
3. count the pixels.
4. Use the shadow formula.
5. d= tan(90-θ) X L.
6. d = tan(90 – 72) x (1899 x 25) cm.
7. d = 15425 cm = 154 m.

Which of these are characteristics of an impact crater?

The features that best determine an impact origin for a crater are (1) a circular rim crest outline, (2) flanks that gently rise [76] above the surrounding terrain, (3) floors with elevations lower than those of the surrounding terrain, (4) an ejecta blanket surrounding the crater, and (S) an inner basin that may be …

Where is the impact crater?

Bottom-left: 50,000-year-old Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff, Arizona, U.S. on Earth.

How does the size of an impact crater depend on height?

We also observed that the diameter of the crater was also affected by the height from which the projectile was dropped. We believe this is due to the different velocities based on the height dropped the projectiles, therefore the higher the projectile was dropped from the larger the impact crater as the projectile had longer to accelerate.

What evidence do we have to prove that an impact crater exists?

The resulting impact crater is the only evidence of its existence. Many people have studied impact craters for both profit, such as Daniel Barringer, and scientific interest, such as Karl Gilbert. We are to follow in their footsteps by analyzing a certain as aspect of the impact crater- its diameter.

What is the diameter of a crater at 90cm?

This result was higher than both other smaller projectiles when dropped at 90cm, which produced craters of 5.6 and 8.0 cm in diameter. Therefore the results for a height of 90cm do have a positive correlation regarding the diameter of the crater.

What are some examples of Impact craters in the Solar System?

The Moon, Mars, and Mercury all have heavily cratered surfaces that are the result of tens of thousands of impacts. Most satellites in the outer solar system also display thousands of impact craters. These heavily cratered surfaces record the period of an intense, solar-system-wide bombardment that ended about 3.8 billion years ago.