Mars crater, looks like another giant hole!

www.space.com...

This thing looks like a giant burned out hole to me, why so many big deep holes on Mars? Fascinating!

It does look pretty odd.Most likely it goes through dramatic changes just like our planet does.I think it's interesting that it appears that water once flowed there.It looks to be a very unstable planet though.I'm not a scientist but could it be possible that a meteor may have plowed into that particular area?It looks pretty well charred for whatever reason?

I agree. It looks pretty odd. There does look to be an a slight ejecta blanket around it, but the radius is very small. They're usually 2 times the diameter of the crater.
Does anyone know how to find the high resolution version of this photo?
Those lines radiating from the center of that large depression area are interesting too!

edit-> Here's more pictures:
www.esa.int...

[edit on 23-5-2008 by cruzion]

On closer inspection, that isn't an impact, although they claim it is a crater. You can clearly see the glacial gouge marks under whatever the black stuff is, that are continuously visible outside the black stuff.
It's obviously a depression, and it looks like it was filled with water at one time, and then the water evaporated, leaving a finer, darker colored silt deposit.



[edit on 23-5-2008 by cruzion]

reply to post by cruzion


I think it is odd that they keep finding all these signs of water, but no water, and large holes that are black inside, like burnt out, but each of those holes look like water drained INTO them. Like all the water had been sucked inside of Mars under implosion, or something like that. Thanks for posting the link Cruzion, lot more pics of it on that link.

I have no idea where the water would evaporate too. It's not in the atmosphere.
It may have once been in the atmosphere, and accumulated on surface as snow or something, then eventually got mixed up with all the loess and sand etc. Maybe it is very high up in the atmosphere because of increased pressure near the surface? According to this link:
www.daviddarling.info...
there is very little atmospheric pressure, and very little water in the atmosphere.
That whole area looks like part of a large drainage basin that has dried up over time. Perhaps it once was glacial, or a glacial run-off collection area.
That whole valley looks to be fairly recent. There are hardly any impact craters within it, although you an see a few small ones, the medium size ones seem very weather in comparison to the landscape, and of course, the numbers are a lot less than the surroundings.
The dark area may have originally been an impact crater, a very old one. You would think that maybes hydrological or aeolian weathering to have smoothed it out, but if that was the case, the bottom of it would be pretty flat, because of the in-fill, not conical! It looks more like a natural feature than an impact site.
Even weirder is those two channels that lead into the depression from the south-west, and the small one from directly south - they aren't dendritic, like normal hydrological drainage patterns. They have arced valley walls. Perhaps they were small rifts that have collapsed and the loess moved over time from the aeolian systems? The center of the channels seem to have deposition marks that run down the center though. Same goes for that channel in the very far bottom right hand corner, too.
The annoted image:
esamultimedia.esa.int...
claims ice flow, which could account for the arcing valley wall collapses.
Still a very intriguing area of Mars though.