Craters: Favorite and Otherwise

This is one of my favorite Martian craters. It's known as the Happy Face Crater.
Every planet should have one.

Here's a sequence showing a small new crater- the image on the left was taken by the Viking spacecraft in 1976 and there is no crater evident:

In 1999, there is a crater. It's a punk-ass crater as far as planetary impacts go...it's unlikely the tiny meteorite responsible would have even made it though Earth's atmoshpere.

By 2006, it's faded a bit. It seems that Mars has enough atmosphere to cause erosion, but not nearly enough to stop meteors.

We are kinda spoiled on Earth, having an atmosphere and all...not only does ours allow us to breathe, but it also shields us from all but the largest of meteors.

If it were not for meteors, we wouldn't have dinosaurs in Chicago:


I didn't know it when I took this pic, but I think I may have photographed a meteorite in this snapshot- above and to the right of the brontosaur skull:

One day in the distant past, a dinosaur much like the one fossilized above may have looked into the afternoon sky and seen a bright streak much like the one in this photo- only the light in the sky kept getting bigger and bigger...

The rest is pre-history.