STFC PhD Studentship - Secondary Impact craters

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Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) funded PhD Studentship on 'Secondary Impact Craters as Absolute Strati graphic Markers at Landing Sites on Mars and the Moon'

Lead Institution:
Natural History Museum (NHM). Lead Supervisor:
Peter Grindrod, NHM. Co-Supervisor:
Joseph McNeil, NHM. Co-Supervisor:
Katherine Joy, University of Manchester. Co-Supervisor:
Gareth Collins, Imperial.

The student will be registered at the University of Manchester.

Impact cratering is ubiquitous across the Solar System. Due to their abundance, impact craters are key to understanding the evolution of planetary surfaces. This project will exploit the vast secondary crater population to investigate a range of features and processes on Mars and the Moon. This work will involve refining the method of primary and secondary crater identification in remote sensing data, before developing a modern workflow of their use as absolute strati graphic markers.

This novel approach will be applied to a range of key science questions on Mars and the Moon. The outcome of this project will be a new, widely applicable, and open method of deriving absolute surface ages.

Stratigraphy is at the heart of understanding the evolution of all solid planetary bodies. Beyond the Earth, despite being arguably the most important factor, time is inherently difficult to determine. The limited number of samples available for detailed geochronological analysis in laboratories severely limits the locations in the Solar System for which we have absolute ages. Instead, planetary science is rooted in applying superposition theory (relative ages) and extrapolated impact crater chronologies (“crater counting”).

The only way to derive an age of a planetary surface through remote sensing methods is through crater size-frequency distribution (CSFD) analysis, a powerful, widely applicable, and common technique across the entire Solar System, but one that has been inherently limited to studies of sufficiently large areas.

Secondary impact craters (“secondaries”) are produced during the excavation stage of the cratering process, from material ejected from the primary crater. A single impact can generate up to 107 secondaries. These secondary craters are often removed as problematic in studies of the age of planetary surfaces. This project will instead exploit the secondary crater population as absolute strati graphic markers, to make new insights into a range of processes on Mars and the Moon.

This project will refine the method for identifying primary and secondary craters on planetary surfaces, before developing a modern application of secondary impact craters as absolute strati graphic markers. Three main projects will help develop and apply this approach: