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Conical Crater

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Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms

Definition

Simple impact crater exhibiting a conical shape.

Description

A conical crater lacks the characteristics of a complex crater like wall terraces and a central peak or pit. From this reason a conical crater is not classified as a complex but as a simple crater. However, while a classical simple crater has a nearly parabolic (bowl) shape (Melosh 1989), a conical crater is another type of simple crater exhibiting smooth, about constant-slope walls that taper towards the bottom. Its shape can be approximated by an inverted cone with a truncated cusp. The floor area is small compared to the rim area (Fig. 1). Visually a conical crater can be identified by its shadow contours (Fig. 2).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Lunar mare crater Euclides (left) and topographic profile derived from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter stereo images (Scholten et al. 2012) (right). The walls are conically shaped with a slope of about 33°, and the floor area is flat and small as compared to the rim area (about 5 %). This marks...

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References

  • Garvin JB et al (2011) Linne: simple lunar mare crater geometry from LRO observations. 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Houston, abstract# 2063

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  • Housen KR, Holsapple KA, Voss ME (1999) Compaction as the origin of unusual craters on asteroid Mathilde. Nature 402:155–157

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  • Melosh HJ (1989) Impact cratering. Oxford University Press, New York

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  • Piekutowski A (1977) Cratering mechanisms observed in laboratory-scale high-explosive experiments. In: Roddy DJ, Pepin RO, Merrill RB (eds) Impact and explosion cratering. Pergamon Press, New York

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  • Scholten F et al (2012) GLD100 – the near global lunar 100 m raster DTM from LROC WAC stereo image data. J Geophys Res. doi:10.1029/2011JE003926

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Planetary Geodesy, German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Rutherfordstr. 2, 12489, Berlin, Germany

    Bernd Giese

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  1. Bernd Giese
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Correspondence to Bernd Giese .

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Giese, B. (2014). Conical Crater. In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_66-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_66-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-9213-9

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