Skip to comments.Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Stickney Crater
Posted on 01/18/2013 3:13:45 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered both the Red Planet's moons in 1877. Over 9 kilometers across, Stickney is nearly half the diameter of Phobos itself, so large that the impact that blasted out the crater likely came close to shattering the tiny moon. This stunning, enhanced-color image of Stickney and surroundings was recorded by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as it passed within some six thousand kilometers of Phobos in March of 2008. Even though the surface gravity of asteroid-like Phobos is less than 1/1000th Earth's gravity, streaks suggest loose material slid down inside the crater walls over time. Light bluish regions near the crater's rim could indicate a relatively freshly exposed surface. The origin of the curious grooves along the surface is mysterious but may be related to the crater-forming impact.
(Excerpt) Read more at 18.104.22.168 ...
Poor little moon. That must have smarted when it hit.
That’s quite a dent in the old generation ship.
Once again, real moons and satellites are made of rock and don’t reflect light all over creation like that. That thing is obviously metallic, obviously made of metallic strakes, and obviously artificial, some sort of a gigantic ancient space station.
The end of life on Earth will involve something like this.
The end of Earth will take longer.
Ew. Looks like streaked bird poop.
Lots of things, including the terrestrial planets, have a lot of metal, including in the crust, which on Earth is mostly silicon and aluminum. IOW, uh, no. It’s an old speculation, and even Sagan suggested it (as his own idea?), but there’s literally zero evidence for it that isn’t also evidence for a prosaic, mundane origin.
I’m amazed by the large photo.
Resembles a snail to me. :)
:’) Depends of course on how big the bolide will be; anything a mile in diameter or more exceeds the energy of all the world’s nuclear weapons combined. The Chicxulub object was approximately 10 miles across, which means, tenfold larger in each dimension, or 1000 times as massive, iow, all the nukes times one thousand. Much of the surface-dwelling animal life would succumb in a few hours, just from the rise in temperature of the entire atmosphere.
But hey, stuff like that is why they call me Mister Sunshine.
It’s an ill-kept secret that Russian penetrating radar has shown rectangular interior spaces.
Do birds eat snails? :’)
I don’t know about you, but that looks like frozen water to me. If we could get there, we could probably live there. Just drill down into it and hollow it out, and take our oxygen-rich trees and plants with us. The Earth is one of the few rocks in the Solar System that has a molten core, don’t you know.
Phobos and Deimos are small, and are obviously either captured asteroids, or were formed from ejecta of impacts on Mars. Phobos has been speculated to be 25-30 percent empty space, iow, a pile of aggregated debris, basically a pile of rubble based on a one or a few largest pieces — much like every other asteroid that has been studied from close up.
The radar study of Phobos was MARSIS, and was by the ESA,, not the Russians.
There was a Russian (alleged) scientist who started claiming back in the 1950s that Phobos was moving irregularly. Naturally, at that time the mass of Mars wasn’t accurately known, and neither was the mass of Phobos for that matter. Here’s fringe website Rense’ page on this:
And oddly enough, Wikipedia has the inside scoop:
That’s VERY Dramatic Photo! Thanks.
Water will come in handy for space settlers, someday — broken down to build oxygen for the atmosphere, as well as used for growing food, and showering off. The Gerard K. O’Neill vision of rotating half-glassed (smirk) cylinders to provide simulated 1-G conditions might become home to literally billions someday — assuming a foolproof way is devised of avoiding punctures or worse due to naturally occuring space debris.
Martian moons: Phobos -- The team concluded that Phobos is likely to contain large voids, which makes it less likely to be a captured asteroid. Its composition and structural strength seem to be inconsistent with the capture scenario. It is possible that Phobos formed in situ at Mars, from ejecta from impacts on the Martian surface, or from the remnants of a previous moon which had formed from the Martian accretion disc and subsequently collided with a body from the asteroid belt. Data from the Mars Express OMEGA spectrometer suggests Phobos has a primitive composition, so primitive materials must have been available for accretion during its formation. The circular orbit suggests that Phobos formed in situ whilst analysis of the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer data from Mars Express also points towards in situ formation but does not rule out the possibility that Phobos is a captured achondrite-like meteor.
NO WAY would I dare name a big hole after my wife.
I was actually startled as it started to load, no joke, and I’d seen similar pics before, just not in a Demille closeup. :’)
Just wait till the Timeshare developers get a hold of it!
I already see a place for a large, rock-lined spa!
Did she pick your FR nick? ;’)
Probably some international authority will phobid it.
I miss Carl Sagan. He was one of the ultimate visionaries of the last century (the 20th century). I read all of his books, and they were very profound. And he died relatively young. What a shame. What a waste of a Clear Spirit.
Probably by declaring Martial Law?
The impact delivered a great deal of energy, and there’s a lot of metal (or quartz?) in the body. The dull-looking part of the surface is covered at least a meter deep in micrometeorites and ejecta dust from larger impacts. This suggests that these craters are fairly recent, but as the age of the moon is far from agreed-upon, there’s no way to estimate an actual age for the two large craters shown.
I think I’ve dated one or two — or at least I felt the fear.
No doubt that got its start during some Arean movement.
The lines look like the result of the lowest-velocity ejecta merely rolling across the surface; in any impact, some goes up and comes back down, some barely leaves the surface, some escapes.
A Celestial Collision · Alaska Science Forum · February 10, 1983 · Larry Gedney · Posted on 09/15/2004 9:04:28 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv -- Early in the evening of June 18, 1178, a group of men near Canterbury, England, stood admiring the sliver of a new moon hanging low in the west. In terms they later described to a monk who recorded their sighting, "Suddenly a flaming torch sprang from the moon, spewing fire, hot coals and sparks." In continuing their description of the event, they reported that "The moon writhed like a wounded snake and finally took on a blackish appearance"... [P]lanetary scientist Jack Hartung of the State University of New York... gathered enough clues to suggest that a large asteroid... might have smacked into the moon just over the horizon on the back side. To test his suspicion, Hartung went to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and inspected Russian and American photographs of the moon's back side. Sure enough, in just the right place, he found a remarkably fresh crater, 12 miles across and twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. From it radiated white splatter marks for hundreds of miles... Such an impact, reason astrophysicists, would set the moon to ringing like a gong for thousands of years... At Texas' McDonald Observatory, astronomers Odile Calame and J. Derral Mulholland of the University of Texas find that the surface of the moon moves back and forth fully 80 feet! Such an oscillation clearly implies a collision with something large, sometime within the not-too-distant past, probably within the memory of mankind. The problem is that there is no way to peg the date exactly at 1178.
My guess is that the shiny flowing looking streaks are molten glass which slopped over the sides.
Dat’s Demos Atrocious pun I ever hoid!
"...is less than 1/1000th Earth's gravity..."
In other words a bad case of flatulence could put you in orbit.
Hey, at my age I’m almost that way in Earth grav! ;’)
Hoagland's take on the subject:
Hoaxland’s not a scientist, and his take is irrelevant, and is definitely not science.
Phobos isn’t “obviously metallic”, it appears shiny here and there at certain angles; from Mars-side it’s obviously rocky. The close-up studies of it lead to the conclusion that it isn’t primarily metal, at all.
The moon is so small and irregularly shaped, the horizon varies a great deal but would appear to be just over the next rise to a visitor to the surface. Those lines are from rolling debris after the impact.
:’) Asaph that’s the most atrocious pun I’ve made...
Is the Stickney Crater anywhere near Uranus?
Sorry for being so atrocious...they kind of write themselves.
Who ever thought Astronomy could be so naughty?
The late Larry Gedney comes through from beyond the grave...
The Hollow Earth Theory
by Larry Gedney
Illustration from the October 1882 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, showing the appearance of Symmes’ Hole near the North Pole.
One can never be sure just how serious they are about it, but there does exist a group of people who call themselves the “Flat-Earth Society” (remember the news item about the old gentleman who was invited to Cape Kennedy to watch an Apollo moon launch, but came away convinced that it was all a hoax?). There is another group, equally vocal, who believe that the earth is hollow. Several years ago, a group of “believers” informed a member of the Geophysical Institute staff that there was an opening to the center of the earth in the Alaska Range, and that this was an entry and exit point for flying saucers.
Modern-day proponents of the hollow earth theory can refer nonbelievers to the book The Hollow Earth (Bell Publishing Company, 1979) by Raymond Bernard. Bernard, judging from the initials he lists behind his name, holds just about every advanced academic degree, but is apparently somewhat of a recluse. As a spokesman for the publisher states in a foreword to the book, “I will not enter into any correspondence regarding this book — or the author. Whether you accept or reject the content of this book is your privilege. No one cares.”
The crux of the hollow earth theory is that the earth is a shell with walls about 800 miles thick. In the polar regions there are holes 1400 miles across, with edges that curve smoothly from the outside of the shell around to the inside. A sea or surface traveler could proceed over an edge of the hole, like an ant crawling over the lip of a coffee mug from the outside to the inside, and not be aware that he was actually entering the interior of the earth. Bernard explains that the holes have never been seen from the air because pilots are fooled by their compasses into believing that they are crossing the pole, when they are actually following the hole’s “magnetic rim”. Thus aircraft never really fly over the geographic poles, which naturally mark the centers of the holes themselves. As irrefutable proof of his claim, he cites Admiral Byrd’s statement, “I’d like to see that land beyond the Pole. That area beyond the Pole is the Great Unknown.”
The hollow earth theory actually seems to have been originated in the early 1800s by John Symmes, an earnest American who devoted the greater part of his later life to convincing the world that the earth was formed by a series of concentric shells.
Symmes believed that there were miles of wondrous unclaimed domain beneath our feet, with lush vegetation and fish and game for the taking. Apparently, there were those who took him seriously. As reported in the October 1882 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, a Mr. Howgate had recently been in the news, proposing that an expedition be made to discover “Symmes’ Hole.” His plan was to have a number of men acclimate themselves to higher and higher latitudes, moving further north each year. They were to observe the animals that presumably wintered over within the earth each year and emerged during the spring to bear young. Eventually, the colony of men were to follow the animals in the fall to find where they entered into that marvelous land at the center of the earth.
Sadly for this romantic concept, if today’s believers are correct, the only thing that they would find there now are flying saucers.
This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Larry Gedney is a seismologist at the Institute.
Richard Hoagland and Tom Van Flandern had/have major kinds of astronophysics credentials; most of the people calling them kooks, including YOU, don’t.
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