4 ms·
Supposedly, craters are uniformly round, because at high speed, meteorites do not act like pebbles hitting mud, but as if they exploded on impact. However, if
by perl4ever 5y ago
Supposedly, craters are uniformly round, because at high speed, meteorites do not act like pebbles hitting mud, but as if they exploded on impact.
However, if you look long enough, you will see some elongated oval ones, suggesting it can be more complicated.
What's really strange, is a crater I found in an old atlas of the Moon from the 1960s, that was approximately square.
Once I asked a planetary geologist what the hell makes a square crater. She went "mumble mumble underlying faults and stresses".