by Nitpicker » Mon Jun 01, 2015 4:15 am
geckzilla wrote:Yeah, I'm not seeing it the way you do, Nit, especially not a rebound. But since neither of us has a hypervelocity testing lab, it seems that it is pointless to do anything but disagree. I know meteors can explode before they impact, but can they explode and make such deep craters before impact? Probably not, but it's an idea. I still like the broken apart / tidally disrupted impactor.
Imagine you throw a stick end-over-end on a low trajectory. If one of the ends makes initial contact with the ground, if can force the other end to "face plant" a little further on, at a slightly different impact angle. Such a mechanism could go some way to explaining how a two lobed, or elongated impactor on a shallow trajectory, might possibly create two distinct craters in line, each showing clear evidence of different impact angles. There might be many other possibilities, also.
If the craters, so close together, were formed by an impactor that broke apart beforehand, the two main fragments should have almost identical impact angles and the craters should therefore look similar to each other. But they don't.
[quote="geckzilla"]Yeah, I'm not seeing it the way you do, Nit, especially not a rebound. But since neither of us has a hypervelocity testing lab, it seems that it is pointless to do anything but disagree. I know meteors can explode before they impact, but can they explode and make such deep craters before impact? Probably not, but it's an idea. I still like the broken apart / tidally disrupted impactor.[/quote]
Imagine you throw a stick end-over-end on a low trajectory. If one of the ends makes initial contact with the ground, if can force the other end to "face plant" a little further on, at a slightly different impact angle. Such a mechanism could go some way to explaining how a two lobed, or elongated impactor on a shallow trajectory, might possibly create two distinct craters in line, each showing clear evidence of different impact angles. There might be many other possibilities, also.
If the craters, so close together, were formed by an impactor that broke apart beforehand, the two main fragments should have almost identical impact angles and the craters should therefore look similar to each other. But they don't.