Submission Date

7-22-2022

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

Physics & Astronomy

Faculty Mentor

Kassandra Martin-Wells

Comments

Presented during the 24th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 22, 2022 at Ursinus College.

Project Description

The study of extraterrestrial surfaces relies on crater identification to evaluate the age and history of planetary bodies. We use JMars, a geospatial information system, to gather data from maps of the region surrounding the Tycho impact crater on the moon, to better understand and study impact mechanics and the history of the lunar surface. We are using this program to identify craters in different regions around Tycho. This process comes with a significant amount of statistical uncertainty. As such, we are using repeatable methods to reduce this uncertainty and make our quantitative results as transparent and reliable as possible. We are developing an automated program using GDL to assist us in data collecting. This program reads in our crater identification data from the craters we counted, sorts them into different bins based on their diameter, and creates cumulative size-frequency distribution graphs. The shape of these graphs reveals how ejecta was spread during the initial impact, helping us to better model impacts and reliably identify and analyze craters in the future.

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