Technology

What is the biggest crater on Mercury?

Joe Ford

What is the biggest crater on Mercury?

Caloris basin

What is the most likely cause for scarps on Mercury?

The surface of Mercury has landforms that indicate its crust may have contracted. These scarps appear to be the surface expression of thrust faults, where the crust is broken along an inclined plane and pushed upward. What caused Mercury’s crust to shrink? As the interior of the planet cooled it contracted.

What is the surface of Mercury covered with?

craters

What two spacecrafts visited Mercury?

Only two probes have ever traveled to the planet. The first was Mariner 10, a spacecraft meant to study both Venus and Mercury. It flew by Mercury three times in 1974 and 1975. Then, in 2004, NASA launched the MESSENGER spacecraft, which successfully inserted itself into Mercury’s orbit in 2011.

Which planet seems to have the most impact craters?

Mercury

What can craters tell us about a planet?

Impact craters provide insights into the age and geology of a planet’s surface. The Martian surface contains thousands of impact craters because, unlike Earth, Mars has a stable crust, low erosion rate, and no active sources of lava.

Does the presence of an atmosphere appear to reduce the number of impact craters?

Earth’s atmosphere certainly slows and prevents typical asteroidal fragments up to a few tens of metres across from reaching the surface and forming a true hypervelocity impact crater, but kilometre-scale objects of the kind that created the smallest telescopically visible craters on the Moon are not significantly …

How do impact craters form?

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. Most of the material falls around the rim of the newly formed crater.

What factors could affect an impact crater’s shape and size?

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 size of asteroid affect the area?

Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the area. If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25 meters but smaller than one kilometer ( a little more than 1/2 mile) were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the impact area.

What are the two reasons that the Earth appears to have relatively few impact craters?

There are so few craters on the Earth because most have been destroyed due to plate tectonics and erosion. There are so few craters on Venus because lava flows have filled in the craters. Also, both planets have atmospheres, which cause the smaller meteoroids to vaporize or broken up into smaller pieces.

Why does the moon almost have no erosion?

The moon has almost no erosion because it has no atmosphere. That means it has no wind, it has no weather, and it certainly has no plants. Almost nothing can remove marks on its surface once they are made.

Why do footprints stay on the moon?

The cohesive forces are small, but on the moon, gravity is also quite low. What’s important is the relative size of the electrostatic cohesive forces and the weight of each particle of dust, and it appears from the fact that the footprint doesn’t collapse under its own weight, that the cohesive forces win out.

Which is the deepest trench in Moon?

South Pole–Aitken basin

Does the dark side of the moon have craters?

The far side has far fewer ‘maria’, which are large dark patches caused by ancient volcanic flows. Instead it is much more densely covered with craters compared to the near side. While the Earth and Moon were forming, heat from the still-molten Earth slowed the cooling process of the near side of the Moon.

What surface region of the moon is oldest?

Lunar Highlands rocks returned by Apollo 16 are about 4 billion years old. The oldest Lunar rock found was located by Apollo 17 and appears to be about 4.5 billion years old.