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Decoding the Surface Age of Mars

Crater counting is the traditional method of determining the surface ages of planets throughout the solar system. Read the full case study here: https://pawsey.org.au/case_studies/cr... This method, up to now, has gathered data painstakingly counting each crater by hand. The current published database for Mars contains hundreds of thousands of craters for diameters larger than 1km. If we can count craters smaller than this, we will be able to target new areas of interest on Mars or date previously analysed areas with much higher precision. Manual counting becomes intractable because the rate of impacts on planetary surfaces follows a power law such that the number of small (less than 1km) craters is exponentially higher than the number of large craters (i.e. number in the millions). To count these requires an automated tool. Here we show that we have developed such a tool. We have validated the results against current manual databases. Importantly, and for the first time, we demonstrate that an automated crater counting tool can deliver geologically meaningful ages. Read the full case study here: https://pawsey.org.au/case_studies/cr...