DISTRIBUTION OF CRATER SIZES IN THE EXPANDED CATALOG OF RECENT CRATER FIELDS ON MARS

Abstract

A catalog of craters, which were recently formed by meteoroid impacts on the surface of Mars, provides an opportunity to study the meteoroid population, which is common to Earth and Mars. Crater size distributions were constructed for clusters from previously identified groups (a dominant main crater, densely populated clusters, and sparsely populated clusters with several largest craters of comparable size), and the average slope of the resulting approximations was estimated. Applying a standard power law resulted in mean exponents of 0.8, 2, and 1.5 for the considered groups of clusters. When using a truncated power law approximation, the average slopes vary within a narrower range (0.8–1.1). It is hypothesized that the identified groups may correspond to different types of impactors and/or different types of meteoroid breakup in the atmosphere.