Planetary Science Seminar

Impact craters are used in a wide variety of applications across almost all planetary surfaces in the solar system. Their most common use is to derive a model age, but doing so requires a large number of assumptions and caveats. I will discuss the creation of a global Martian impact crater database and some of its uses and how ages are modeled from the impact crater population. I will then discuss some of the most recent work showing why these applications are not as straight-forward as many have assumed for the last several decades and what this means for not only the global crater database of Mars, but for crater studies across the solar system.