chriscardenas

[chriscardenas]

Studying Mars Craters: What They Can Tell Us

I always been fascinated by the studies of space and about the stories that planets can tell us. That's why I choose to work with the data of Mars Craters Study. These craters aren't just random holes in the ground; they're like fingerprints that can reveal secrets about geological processes or atmospheric conditions over millions of years. These data can help us to uncover patterns about how impact processes work.

Research Questions

For this data analysis project, I've chosen to explore the relation between Crater Depth and Diameter Relationship, so the first research question will be:

Is there an association between crater depth and crater diameter?

Intuitively, you might think bigger craters would be deeper, but this is something that I would to confirm with the data, because reality can be way more complex due to factors like the angle of impact, composition of both the impactor and the Martian surface, erosion over time, etc.

A second topic that I would like to explore is a relation between Ejecta Complexity and Crater Depth. This second topic can tell us some information about how impacts of celestial bodies can create complex structures. I'm curious whether deeper craters, which presumably involved more energetic impacts, tend to produce more complex ejecta patterns. So, the second question will be:

Is there an association between the number of ejecta layers and crater depth?

Previous Researches Review

Using the Claude AI (Anthropic, 2023), I made a literature review about my first research question.

The relationship between crater depth and diameter has been extensively studied on Mars, researchers had found a power-law relationship that varies depending on the crater characteristics and preservation state. Tornabene et al. (2017) conducted a study using Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data on 224 pitted material craters ranging from ~1 to 150 km in diameter, finding that impact craters with pitted floor deposits are among the deepest on Mars.

Robbins and Hynek (2012) analyzed a global database of 384,343 Martian craters and found that simple craters in their database have a depth/diameter relationship of 8.9 ± 1.9%. Antoher work by Cintala and Head (1976) found depth/diameter ratios for 87 craters ranging from 12 to 100 km in diameter and 0.4 to 3.3 km in depth.

Hypothesis

Based on this small research, a hypothesis could be: There will be a significant power-law relationship between crater depth (DEPTH_RIMFLOOR_TOPOG) and crater diameter (DIAM_CIRCLE_IMAGE). Form of this relationship could be Depth = a × Diameter^b.

Bibliography

Tornabene, L. L., Osinski, G. R., McEwen, A. S., Boyce, J. M., Bray, V. J., Caudill, C. M., ... & Wray, J. J. (2017). A depth versus diameter scaling relationship for the best-preserved melt-bearing complex craters on Mars. Icarus, 299, 68-83. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103516308363

Robbins, S. J., & Hynek, B. M. (2012). A new global database of Mars impact craters ≥1 km: 2. Global crater properties and regional variations of the simple‐to‐complex transition diameter. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 117(E6). https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011JE003967

Cintala, M. J., Head, J. W., & Mutch, T. A. (1976). Martian crater depth/diameter relationships: Comparison with the Moon and Mercury. Proceedings, 7th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, 3575-3587. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976LPSC….7.3575C/abstract

Anthropic. (2023). Claude (Sonnet 4 version) [Large language model]. https://www.anthropic.com/