I'm also quiet fascinated by the terrrestrial / geological remnants of impact sites. I reckon this is a way to bring the far away astro stuff to a point where you can see it, touch it, feel it - make it real in a face to face kind of way, if you follow me. (I actually have a small, but growing collection of meteorite fragments - and I won a very good book on the subject at Astrofest last year!)
There are several good impact sites around Australia, and I do hope to visit most of them in time.
Most are in NT or WA - a bloody long drive from here on the east coast!
When travelling around the outback back in '99 I did get to
Gosse Bluff (good photo in link) - the worlds largest
comet impact crater. In fact a few days after driving to the central "ring" of hills and having a look at ground level we chartered a Robinson 44 'copter and did a fly over / circle around the site as well. Being only a couple of hours west-ish of Alice Springs it's easily reachable if you are in the area.
A similar distance south of Alice Springs (straight down the highway) lay the
Henbury Meteorite Craters (more info
here and
here) - one larger crater near 200 metres or so across with several other smaller craters co-located. If memory serves it is supposed to have been caused by a metallic meteorite weighing several tonnes which exloded above ground level before impact, thus several separate large fragments (and hundreds of smaller ones) slammed into the earth fairly hard.
I didn't quite make it to Wolfe Creek in WA, something I am bitterly disappointed about now but I will rectify that at some stage in the future. Possibly a nice long slow trip west and north again (and all points in between) to be scheduled in sometime between now and 2012 when I plan on heading to Cairns for the eclipse.
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While looking up photo links for this post I found the following excerpt from a Mars Society
.pdf document - I knew NASA had looked at the Henbury site as a simulated "off world" environment, most of the rest was news to me but I do find it interesting:
"
Australia has been of interest to manned mission planners for some time. The Henbury Craters, near Alice Springs, were studied extensively by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in the 1960’s as part of the Apollo programme.
In recent times, dunes and erosional features of the Strezelecki Desert and alluvial flood plains of Hale River have been analysed as analogues of features evident in data captured by the Global Surveyor Mars Orbiting Camera (MOC) and Mars Orbiting Laser Altimeter (MOLA).
NASA has funded astrobiology research in Australia for the last decade. Recent field work has focussed on ancient hydrothermal spring formations at Mt Painter in the northern Flinders Ranges where the search for metallurgical evidence of past microbial life is regarded as analogous to the search that will be needed on Mars.
This work has included use of the Australian-invented PIMA infra-red spectrometer for characterising hydrated minerals and correlating ground measurements with satellite imagery. This technology is ideally suited to searching for telltale signs of extant life from Mars orbit or on the surface by the first crews."