Impacts Lead to Physics Problem

An image of the 3 iconic craters of Vespa dubbed the
        "snowman"Image Source

The above image is a detail of three distinct craters on the asteroid Vesta, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft.[NASA] The effects of impacts between larger planetary bodies and smaller ones are usually presented as images such as this; sterile, alien and as a permanent feature of whatever body happens to be adorned with such scars. Though most of the crates in this image (and there is very little space not showing an impact crater) are likely a result of the initial accretion stages of solar development, or the later Late Heavy Bombardment, many of them will be relatively recent. We often link asteroids of substantial size as artifacts of Earth's past or the subject for unimpressive 90's action movies.
Meteor Crater, Arizona. Fair sized
            hole-in-the-ground.Image Source

A little closer to home, this image is Meteor Crater, Arizona and is a little over a kilometer wide, formed from an impact 20k-50k years ago. Not exactly doomsday sized but consider that the meteorite that created the crater is only 80 feet wide.[NEOP] Most modern impacts are with very small rock type meteors, which tend to burn up, or burst in the atmosphere.[Saito] The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet colliding with Jupiter 1994 brought the significance of rouge hunks of mass moving through space into somewhat sharper focus.

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