Damodar (crater)

Damodar is an impact crater on (253) Mathilde , an asteroid in the main central belt .

The mean diameter of the crater is 28.7 km, making it one of the larger craters of (253) Mathilde (the largest is called Karoo ). The center of Damodar's crater is 73 ° North and 263.8 ° East.

The rim of the crater is very steep, no ejecta was seen.

(253) Mathilde was visited on June 27, 1997 by the NEAR Shoemaker space probe en route to the asteroid (433) Eros . At a distance of 1212 km at a speed of 9.93 km / s (35,748 km / h), 500 photos of the surface could be taken, but only from one hemisphere, so that 60 percent of the surface could be photographed.

designation

The crater was named in 2000 after the Damodar mining area , which is located near the city of Durgapur on the Damodar River in the Indian state of West Bengal and is described as the largest in India.

The surface of (253) Mathilde is very dark with an albedo of 0.0436 (± 0.004), blacker than coal . Therefore, the craters were named after coal mining areas. The 1983 Concise Guide to World Coalfields of the International Energy Agency (IEA) of the OECD was used as the source for the names .

Web links

Damodar in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature of the IAU (WGPSN) / USGS (English)
Map with the named Mathildekratern ( PDF , 388 kB; English)

Individual evidence

↑ Robert Sullivan, Peter Thomas, Scott Murchie, Mark Robinson: Asteroid Geology from Galileo and NEAR Shoemaker Data , p. 338, in William Bottke , Alberto Cellino, Paolo Paolicchi , Richard Binzel (eds.): Asteroids III . The University of Arizona Press, Tucson 2002; ISBN 0-8165-2281-2 .

[1] Robert Sullivan, Peter Thomas, Scott Murchie, Mark Robinson: Asteroid Geology from Galileo and NEAR Shoemaker Data , p. 338, in William Bottke , Alberto Cellino, Paolo Paolicchi , Richard Binzel (eds.): Asteroids III . The University of Arizona Press, Tucson 2002; ISBN 0-8165-2281-2 .