The Meteor Crater in the American state of Arizona was developed by a modest asteroid about 50,000 years ago in Colorado Plateau. It is situated practically 70 km in the east of Flagstaff, near Winslow in the northern Arizona desert of the United States of America. Formerly recognized as the Canyon Diablo Crater, this wondrous web site was named soon after Daniel Barringer as Barringer Crater who
How Big was the Meteor that hit Arizona
The Barringer Meteorite Crater (also known as the ‘Meteor Crater’) is a massive crater in the Arizona desert’s dry sandstone. A 50-meter-high ring of crushed and jumbled stones, some the size of small houses, rises from the surrounding plain. The crater is roughly 1500 metres broad and 180 metres deep. When Europeans first found the crater, the plain around it was littered with fragments of meteoritic iron weighing over 30 tonnes and spanning an area 12 to 15 kilometres in circumference. Scientists currently assume that the crater formed some 50,000 years ago. The meteorite that created it was nearly completely comprised of nickel-iron, suggesting that it formed in the core of a tiny planet. It was 50 metres broad, weighed around 300,000 tonnes, and travelled at a speed of 65,000 kilometres per hour. By draping an ASTER bands 3-2-1 picture over a digital elevation model from the US Geological Survey National Elevation Dataset, this ASTER 3-D perspective view was constructed.
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on May 17, 2001. ASTER will scan Earth over the next 6 years, mapping and monitoring the changing surface of our planet using 14 spectral bands ranging from visible to thermal infrared wavelengths with a high spatial resolution of 15 to 90 metres (approximately 50 to 300 ft).
ASTER is one of five Earth-observing sensors deployed on NASA’s Terra spacecraft on December 18, 1999. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry created the instrument. Validation and calibration of the equipment and data outputs are the responsibility of a collaborative US/Japan research team. The US Science team is led by Dr. Anne Kahle of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the project manager is Bjorn Eng of JPL. ASTER is Terra’s only high-resolution image sensor. The Terra mission is a component of NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise.
Meteor Crater In Arizona
Meteor Crator is a bowl-shaped depression surrounded by a rim made primarily of debris heaped in layers of varying composition. Inverted bedrock stratigraphy is maintained in the debris. The debris rests atop earlier disturbed strata that are twisted up at moderate to severe angles in the crater wall and are locally flipped near the debris contact.
These characteristics of Meteor Crater are similar to those of a crater formed by a nuclear explosion, where the depth of burial of the bomb was approximately one-fifth the diameter of the resulting crater. The structures of crater rims are sensitive to the depth of explosion scaled to the yield of the bomb, according to studies of craters generated by nuclear device detonation. Meteor Crater’s structure is similar to that of a very strong shock starting around the current crater bottom, 400 feet below the original surface.
An impacting meteorite enters the earth at supersonic to hypersonic velocity via a complicated mechanism that combines shock compression of the target rocks and meteorite as well as hydrodynamic movement of the compressed material under high pressure and temperature.
The depth of penetration of the meteorite before it loses its integrity as a single entity is mostly determined by the meteorite’s velocity and form, as well as the densities and equations of state of the meteorite and target.
The highly compressed material is subsequently scattered in a vast volume of breccia created by the expanding shock wave. In light of the experimental equation of state of iron and estimated compressibility of the target rocks, an impact velocity of around 15 km/sec is consistent with the geology of Meteor Crater. Scaling estimates the meteorite’s kinetic energy to be between 1.4 and 1.7 megatons TNT equivalent.
