Thursday, 21 July 2011

Shoemaker (formerly Teague) Impact Structure

"The Shoemaker (formerly Teague) Impact Structure—located in Western Australia in a drainage basin south of the Waldburg Range—presents an other-worldly appearance in this astronaut photograph. The Shoemaker impact site is approximately 30 kilometers (19 miles) in diameter and clearly defined by concentric ring structures formed in sedimentary rocks (brown to dark brown, image center). The rocks were deformed by the impact event approximately 1.63 billion years ago (as reported by the Earth Impact Database). Other age-dating analyses of granitic rocks at the core of the structure call this age into question (Pirajno et al. 2003)."
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/EarthObservatory/Shoemaker_Impact_Structure.htm
"Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken photographs of the Earth. Our database tracks the locations, supporting data, and digital images for these photographs. We process images coming down from the International Space Station on a daily basis and add them to the 1,101,059 views of the Earth already made accessible on our website."