Submission Date

4-24-2023

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

Physics & Astronomy

Adviser

Kassandra Martin-Wells

Committee Member

Casey Schwarz

Committee Member

Christopher Sadowski

Committee Member

Kassandra Martin-Wells

Department Chair

Casey Schwarz

Project Description

The cause of asymmetries in ray systems created by impact craters has long remained a mystery. Sabuwala et al. (2018) showed that a relation exists between the creation of prominent rays, impactor diameter, and the number of prominent valleys present at the impact site. We have developed a data pipeline to process and analyze the data required in methods as outlined by Sabuwala et al. (2018) to analyze pre-impact topography and predict impactor diameters using topographic data and prominent ray counts. This has allowed us to validate their original findings and construct order-of-magnitude predictions of hypothetical impactor diameters for the lunar craters Kepler, Ohm, Tycho, Jackson, and Copernicus and have found that the method is particularly sensitive to the model parameters chosen. These findings might be used to constrain such scaling laws and probe lunar geological features.

Download

Share

COinS