Small fresh impact!

Here's an image showing a very small impact, and a second one a bit further, right on the edge of a dune. Any guesses on how old it is?

Interesting, thanks for pointing that out.

Subj change... Is that a rover wheel(s) track running between the dunes?

It looks very new, but it could easily be 1 million years old. They might take some closeups.

I just did an anaglyph of it:

(3d glasses needed)

It could be a cylendar, which means it might be a RAT hole, or it could be something else, don't know. Interesting though.

Reply 1: I don't think so.

courtesy of http://yspowder.hp.infoseek.co.jp/

I think it is obviously a Mars Bunny hole

I think years, not millions. Probably not more than 100. Boy, rocks falling all the time. I guess it helps to have an atmosphere of sorts. Something that small would never make it to earth.

Yaeh, but I think the average person doesn't realize how often there are such similar impacts on Earth -- even with its thicker atmosphere. As populated as the planet is, most impacts fall in unpopulated or thinly populated areas. I remember an incident in Delaware about 10 years ago, where a small meteor ripped into an iced-over pond. Over the course of a few hours, the heat melted a wide circle in the ice, which subsequently froze over again -- wiping out any evidence that the strike ever happened.

a small meteor the size of a baseball or football nailed a car in Westchester, New York. The American Museum of Natural History actually had the car on display for a while too.

Daniel,

you mean this one?

[link]

pretty impressive, isn't it?

Here's another link to a similar incident:

[link]

It could't be older than a month. Even less than a week.
Depends on the strength and frequencies of the winds?!

If it was a meteorite which created the whole.
Where is that thing?

Maybe there are hollow spaces underneath the surface, which come free by the play of the wind.

Rooch

It couldn't be older than 10^5 or 10^6 months. How often have the dunes moves in geologically recent times? Not while Opportunity has stayed in one place looking ("couldn't be older than a week" is ruled right out). Maybe they last moved a year ago, or 100,000 years ago. Could be a day old, or a LOT more than a month. (I know it looks fresh, but if anyone has ground truth on actual ages of Martian craters, you should really consider publishing more.)

Could it also be something else ?

Yep Hans - thats the one. It was way way way more impressive in person.

They had it mounted on a wall in a large room (the canoe room as little kids call it)that leads to the halls of Geology/Human Biology (don't ask me why they paired the two) and NorthWest Indians.

This also look pretty strange, you see the small "rift"?

And besides that, what are the large thing in the upper part of the picture, at the horizon? Look like really big dunes.

that martian village looks pretty interesting.

Ant lions are from Mars...they are too ugly to be from Earth. See one up close and personal here...

[link]

>>>Ant lions are from Mars...they are too ugly to be from Earth. See one up close and personal here...

It's funny to me that you mentioned that, because that's the first thing that went through my mind as well. I remember being fascinated when I first discovered ant lions as a kid -- at the expense of a few hapless ants, unfortunately.

The conical depression doesn't look like a "crater" at first glance, does it? In the split second after I first saw the image, the depression registered in my mind as reminiscent of an ant-lion cone, then a small sink hole, and finally, a micro-meteor impact. All things considered, of course, the latter is the most likely.

And they did not even stop to examine it more closely.

But noone has noticed that a similar soil depression is located near to the "fresh crater"?

I think it maybe a sand behaviour:
you obtain the same effect when you play with sand, a little movement can thrill a "funnel reaction".

Maybe that the less marked crater is at an initial phase of the same process which involved the bigger one.