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The area around the Aorounga Impact Crater, in the Sahara Desert of northern Chad. The crater, which is visible to the left of the center of the image, was formed by a comet or asteroid impact a few hundred million years ago. The crater is about 11 mi (17 km) across and was produced by an object about 1 mi (2 km) across. The crater may be part of a chain of multiple impact craters produced by fragments of one impacting object, and the dark ring just to the upper right of the center of the image may be a second impact crater. Asteroids large enough to produce the crater strike Earth about once every million years. The image was obtained by SIR-C/X-SAR on the Space Shuttle Endeavour on April 11, 1994 and shows an area about 22 mi (36 km) on a side.
Image and text copyright © Astrographics. All rights reserved. Image courtesy of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. |
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