top five incredible and massive craters in space make you fall in love with solar system

Sydney/London : The formation of craters is a natural process on every solid body of the solar system due to heavy pressure. Actually, pits are formed on any solid surface due to the impact of a hard object. Such craters that form on Earth are usually lost over time due to active geological processes, but there are some giant craters in the Solar System that have been preserved forever for all to see. Here, we take you through some of these rare gifts of the Solar System.

1. South Pole-Aitken Basin, Moon

Our first crater is quite large, the largest, deepest and oldest impact crater on the Moon. It is 2,500 km in diameter, 6.2 to 8.2 km deep and is approximately 4.2 billion years old. As the name suggests, it is located at the far south pole of the Moon. However the ends of the crater can be seen from Earth as a dark mountain range on the boundary between the light and dark side of the Moon. It is a favorite place for lunar scientists to learn about the geology of our Moon.

The depth of the crater is about the same as that of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth. It gives us a unique view of the interior of the Moon’s crust, with a history of 4.2 billion years. In 2019, a rover from the Chinese space agency, Chang’e 4, reached the basin and conducted the first scientific experiments there. The most interesting of these was the Lunar Micro Ecosystem, a collection of seeds and insect eggs designed to see if life could thrive in a small biosphere on the surface.

2. Unnamed Crater (S1094b), Mars

There are several well-known craters on Mars, including sites for Mars rovers (Curiosity’s Gale Crater or Perseverance’s Jezero) as well as hypothesized source regions of Martian meteorites (Tooting or Mojave). But one of the newest craters on the Red Planet is actually quite dramatic. While the Mars rovers claim the proud credit for exploring the surface of Mars, satellites orbiting Mars have been making discoveries of their own for decades. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was launched in 2005 but is still operational, and its 16+ years of images of the surface of Mars allow us to make year-to-year comparisons, coming between data sets. They point out the difference. On Christmas Eve in 2021, NASA’s InSight mission detected a large ‘marsquake’ on the Red Planet, which MRO data later helped identify as a new impact on the other side of Mars.

3. Enki Catena, Ganymede

Enki Catena is a series of craters on Ganymede, one of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. At the latest count, Jupiter has over 90 moons, a small planetary system of its own. Jupiter’s gravity creates tidal forces that shape the moons and give us some of the most interesting geological features we’ve yet found, from Io’s volcanoes to Europa’s subsurface ocean. Crater strings have also been found on two moons, Callisto and Ganymede. These crater chains were first observed when the Voyager 1 spacecraft gave us some of the first pictures of the surface of these moons in 1979.

They were believed to be possibly collapsed lava tubes, similar to those observed on Mars and the Moon. However, their origin was under debate until the Shoemaker–Levy 9 comet was observed to have collided with Jupiter. The comet was seen to break into many pieces and this gave an idea of ​​how these chains could form – Jupiter’s gravity separates the objects into many pieces that all impact together. Enki Catena is a series of 13 craters that run from the darkest to the brightest areas on Ganymede. It is 162 kilometers in length and about 10 kilometers wide. The European Space Agency’s JUICE mission will visit the Jovian system in the 2030s and help us see the surfaces in more detail than ever before. We may also find more chains of these pits.

4. Occator Crater, Ceres

Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is large and round enough to be considered a ‘dwarf planet’ (along with Pluto and the three lesser-known examples Eris, Makemake and Haumea). The Occator crater on Ceres is very attractive because it has a bright spot in the center as seen from space and from Earth at the Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawaii. NASA’s Dawn mission entered an orbit around Ceres in 2015, and photographed the bright spot in Occator Crater known as ‘Spot 5’. It is a three-kilometer-wide dome covered by bright salts on the crater floor, possibly resulting from hydrothermal activity. Occator Crater is 92 km in diameter and 3 km deep. The simulations indicate that the body (the space rock that created the crater) that hit Ceres 25 million years ago was roughly more than five km wide.

5. Aurelia, Venus

Venus is sometimes called Earth’s twin. When it comes to size, however, the pictures we have of the surface of Venus show that the characteristics of the planets are very different. The best such pictures were taken by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s. Venus has a thick cloudy atmosphere, and visible-light cameras cannot see the surface. Magellan was equipped with a radar that could ‘see’ the surface – but the images could be hard to interpret.

In radar, the dark area is very smooth and the bright area is very bumpy. This allows radar pictures of impact craters to be visible properly. The ejecta are very rough, especially in front of the surrounding volcanic plains, so they appear bright in the images. Aurelia is a 32 km impact crater on Venus. Speaking of volcanoes on Venus, a group from the University of Alaska Fairbanks recently used this Magellan data to find the first active volcano on Venus. NASA has three Venus missions planned in the next 10 years, so hopefully soon. We will learn more about this twin planet.

(Helen Brand, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization and Natasha Stephen, Imperial College London)