Venus' 'missing' giant impact craters may be hiding in plain sight

image via Space.com

November 7, 2024, 11:00 AM

• •A team of planetary scientists has explained Venus' apparent dearth of large craters by discovering that impacts could have produced the mysterious "tesserae" formations on the Venusian surface.
• •The team focused on a 1,500-km-wide (900 miles) Venusian tessera called Haastte-baad, and applied modeling to radar maps of the tessera to try and better understand how it formed.
• •The modeling shows that, because of the thin lithosphere, a large asteroid impact could relatively easily punch through the crust and into the mantle below, allowing lava to flood upward and pool in the resulting crater, forming, in this case, the Haastte-baad tessera.

A team of planetary scientists have explained Venus' apparent dearth of large craters by discovering that impacts could have produced the mysterious "tesserae" formations on the Venusian surface.

Read original article