Tag Archives: crater

It is.

Behold: Mimas – the Death Starriest of all Saturn’s moons.  See that big dent though? That’s no super laser emitter. To wit:

Whatever hit Mimas nearly destroyed it. What remains is one of the largest impact craters on one of Saturn‘s smallest round moons. Analysis indicates that a slightly larger impact would have destroyed Mimas entirely. The huge crater, named Herschel after the 1789 discoverer of Mimas, Sir William Herschel, spans about 130 kilometers and is featured here. Mimas‘ low mass produces a surface gravity just strong enough to create a spherical body but weak enough to allow such relatively large surface features. Mimas is made of mostly water ice with a smattering of rock – so it is accurately described as a big dirty snowball. The featured image was taken during the closest-ever flyby of the robot spacecraft Cassini past Mimas in 2010 while in orbit around Saturn.

(Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Space Science Institute, Cassini)

apod

Last June, an intrepid team of scientists and explorers ventured onto the shore of the world’s largest lava lake –  8 million cubic meters of liquid rock, boiling in the depths of the Nyiragongo Crater on the Rwanda/Congo border in Africa.

To get a sense of scale, look at the figure on the bottom left of the fourth image.

Now check out the full sequence.

Nyiragongo Crater: Journey to the Center of the World – 28 hi-res photos – (Boston Globe)