New Craters on Mars: An Updated Catalog

Abstract

Newly formed craters on Mars were first discovered by Malin et al. (2006), using an imaging campaign with the Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) to find 20 new impacts by manually comparing the repeat images of the same areas. These techniques have been continued with the Context Camera (CTX) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for the last ∼15 years (Daubar et al., 2013 and this work). These new craters have provided valuable new information about Mars, revealing shallow subsurface ice (

Meteoroid Fragmentation in the Martian Atmosphere and the Formation of Crater Clusters

“…To produce a set of synthetic crater clusters for comparison with those observed on the surface of Mars, a number of Monte Carlo simulations were carried out. While some observed cluster characteristics, such as effective diameter and number of craters, show a dependency on surface elevation (Neidhart et al, 2021), the ratio of cluster-forming to single-crater impacts is independent of surface elevation (Daubar et al, 2021) and about 50% of impact sites have surface elevations within 2 km of the MOLA 0 km reference.…”

“…A database of 634 recently formed crater clusters was mapped and characterized in detail by Neidhart et al (2021). This represents about 90% of the clusters in the updated catalog of new impact sites on Mars (Daubar et al, 2021); clusters not included were added to the catalog after we had completed portions of our analysis. Here, we augment this data set of clusters with a random sample of 90% (456) of new single craters from the same catalog.…”

“…Repeated imaging of the surface of Mars by orbiting spacecraft over the last two decades has revealed more than one thousand impact sites formed in this time period (Daubar et al, 2013(Daubar et al, , 2019(Daubar et al, , 2021. These observations provide important constraints on the current rate of small impacts on Mars, which are valuable for calibrating crater production models (Daubar et al, 2013;Williams et al, 2014), assessing the impact hazard to spacecraft on Mars, and determining the ratio of primary to secondary crater production rates (Hartmann et al, 2018).…”

“…Among the known recent impact sites, fewer than half are single craters; the majority are fields of craters, known as crater clusters (Daubar et al, 2013(Daubar et al, , 2019(Daubar et al, , 2021Neidhart et al, 2021). The size and separation of individual craters within these clusters suggest that they are formed due to atmospheric break up of the primary meteoroid into a collection of fragments that separate and strike the ground almost simultaneously (Artemieva & Shuvalov, 2001;Popova et al, 2003Popova et al, , 2007.…”

Meteoroid Fragmentation in the Martian Atmosphere and the Formation of Crater Clusters

“…To produce a set of synthetic crater clusters for comparison with those observed on the surface of Mars, a number of Monte Carlo simulations were carried out. While some observed cluster characteristics, such as effective diameter and number of craters, show a dependency on surface elevation (Neidhart et al., 2021), the ratio of cluster‐forming to single‐crater impacts is independent of surface elevation (Daubar et al., 2022) and about 50% of impact sites have surface elevations within 2 km of the MOLA 0 km reference. For this study, therefore, all simulations used the same atmospheric density profile, with a surface air density of 0.0157 kg m −3 , a surface elevation of 0 km and began with the meteoroid at an altitude of 100 km.…”