[X] My Assistant

[ugordan]

This has got to be one of the coolest Mars images yet: http://themis.asu.edu/zoom-20080813a

A meteor burning up above the ground leaving no crater, only a record of a powerful shockwave hitting the ground!

You can see how the ground zero area god disturbed very little as the shock was coming almost straight down and the darkened outer portion is where dust was blown away as the radial portion of the shock picked up in strength. It's where trees would have been leveled if this were Earth

One can infer the direction it came from, from below in the image moving in a 11 o’clock direction judging by lack of dust there (the shock would also principally be moving downward along the flight path). The strongest disturbance is further along the flight path from ground zero where the shock would be reinforced by the kinetic energy of the body (see recent Tunguska simulations on this effect).

Awesome stuff, even if coming from someone who likes big things going BOOM.

[dvandorn]

Oh, and as for this particular crater -- I may be imagining things again, but I have a very definite memory of looking over detailed MGS pics of this crater, very high resolution in fact. I was impressed by how different this crater looked from other Martian or even Lunar craters, that *this* looked like a recently-dug hole in the ground. I also recall a discussion in the detailed caption about the origin of the separated dark rays, though airburst wasn't one of the options I recall being mentioned by Malin et. al.

Anyone else recall seeing this feature in the MGS archives sometime in the last five to ten years?

-the other Doug

[mcaplinger]

Anyone else recall seeing this feature in the MGS archives sometime in the last five to ten years?

Perhaps not this particular crater (I didn't search the MGS fresh crater catalog), but certainly there are many such similar features in the MGS captioned releases; see, e.g., http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2006/1...te14/index.html

This is old news.