[X] My Assistant

[ramjet146]

I'm an electonic technician, and my hobby is 3d graphics. Could someone explain to me why nearly all craters on mars and the moon have impacts that appear to be at right angles to the surface. This should be to my way of thinking an impossibility since everything in our System is rotating and moving. surelly there has to be a majority of tangentially made craters. Victoria is straight in, or is it a collapse.

[dvandorn]

I will add to this discussion, that while only very low-angle impacts create elliptical craters, depressed-angle impacts do produce (to a greater or lesser degree) asymmetrical ejecta blankets. While the shock of the impact creates a spherical blast wave (which manifests as a roughly circular crater), the angle of the impactor and the direction in which it was traveling when it impacted (among other things) determines how the ejecta is sprayed.

There are many circular craters on the Moon with very non-circular ejecta blankets, mostly due to angle of impact...

-the other Doug