Airy (Mars crater)
| Mars Crater Airy | ||
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| position | 5 ° 12 ′ S , 0 ° 3 ′ W | |
| diameter | 43 km | |
| history | ||
| Eponym | George Biddell Airy | |
Airy is an impact crater on Mars . The diameter of the crater, located a little south of the Martian equator, is a little more than 43 kilometers. Inside Airy is the Airy-0 crater , which has a diameter of 500 meters and defines the position of the prime meridian on Mars.
Airy lies within the "meridian bay" ( Sinus Meridiani ) which appears to be conspicuously dark from the earth . This was used by the German astronomers Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler in their observations carried out in the 1830s as a feature with which they determined the period of rotation of Mars. This feature, simply called “A” by Beer and Mäder, was used by Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877 to determine the zero median for his maps of Mars. The data from Mariner 9 required a more precise definition in 1972, so the Airy-0 crater was used for clarification.
Airy is named after the English astronomer George Biddell Airy , whose definition of the Earth's prime meridian, used for observations at the Royal Greenwich Observatory , was adopted internationally in 1884.
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Individual evidence
- ↑ Michel Capderou: Satellites: orbits and missions. Springer Verlag, Paris 2005, ISBN 2-287-21317-1 , page 406
- ↑ Oliver Morton: Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World. Picador USA, New York 2002, ISBN 0-312-24551-3 , page 22f