Despite being half the size of Earth , the Red Planet has a astonishing 300,000 impact craters litter its control surface . equate this with the paltry 128 that scientists have managed to find on our planet ’s outside , and you have to wonder why there ’s such a big difference . Is it because they get wear away on our planet quicker than on Mars , or do we simply demand to look harder ?
Anew survey , carry out by investigator at theUniversity of Freiburg , has concluded that this meager number is not due to poor search elbow grease but fairly accurately mull the phone number that should be expected for the work put in , and that all of the large wallop craters have already been found . They estimate that while all craters above 6 kilometers ( 3.7 mile ) in diam have been documented , there are still some 350 smaller single hiding out there . This is still significantly fewer than what we see on Mars , which the researchers conclude is attributable to erosion by wind and rain .
“ I ’m definitely surprised , ” Brandon Johnson , a planetary scientist who was not involved in the study , toldScience . “ It ’s the first meter anyone has done this kind of thing – taking into account the effects of erosion . ”
By combining the estimates of encroachment volcanic crater number and the known rates of erosion , the scientist were capable to bring about the most accurate prediction yet for the numeral of craters to be expected . Theresults , to be print inEarth and Planetary Science Letters , suggest that researchers should stop looking for larger encroachment sites and should rather start looking for the smaller ones . But we should n’t just be looking at retiring events . At some head , there will be another strike .
expert put the betting odds of a 100 - megaton asteroid hitting Earth in your life somewhere in the same ballpark as you having a car accident on a given day . Not massively high , but at the same metre , high-pitched enough to make you wear your seat belt . This has conduce to a group of experts , scientist and filmmaker creatingAsteroid Day , a spheric awareness run to encourage people from all around the universe to get together and talk about the orotund lump of rock hurtling through blank space and the threat that they posture to our planet .
It’sestimatedthat there may be more than a million asteroid that could hit our planet with devastating force , and yet we bang about just 1 % of those whirr around our solar organization at the second . Because of this , there is a call to action to sign the100x announcement , to get more research and funding place not just into the spotting of asteroid , but into young engineering to aid to protect the Earth from such potential collisions .
