Scientists find and catalogue an astounding 635,000 large crater impacts on Mars

June 11 2012 – SPACE – It’s no secret that Mars is a beaten and battered planet — astronomers have been peering for centuries at the violent impact craters created by cosmic buckshot pounding its surface over billions of years. But just how beat up is it? Really beat up, according to a University of Colorado Boulder research team that recently finished counting, outlining and cataloging a staggering 635,000 impact craters on Mars that are roughly a kilometer or more in diameter. As the largest single database ever compiled of impacts on a planet or moon in our solar system, the new information will be of help in dating the ages of particular regions of Mars, said CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Stuart Robbins, who led the effort. The new crater atlas also should help researchers better understand the history of water volcanism on Mars through time, as well as the planet’s potential for past habitability by primitive life, he said. “Many of the large impact craters generated hydrothermal systems that could have created unique, locally habitable environments that lasted for thousands or millions of years, assuming there was water in the planet’s crust at the time,” said Hynek. “But large impacts also have the ability to wipe out life forms, as evident from Earth’s dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact 65 million years ago.” Robbins said most of the smaller diameter craters on Mars are younger than the largest craters and form the bulk of the planet’s crater population. “The basic idea of age dating is that if a portion of the planet’s surface has more craters, it has been around longer,” said Robbins. Much of the planet has been “resurfaced” by volcanic and erosional activity, essentially erasing older geological features, including craters. –Physics

I discuss why Mars is the most heavily-cratered planet in the Solar System and what potentially caused the missing planet next to it to explode in my book The 7th Protocol.