Professor of Mathematics
Paata Ivanisvili
Department of Mathematics, University of California, Irvine
← Possible new impact sites on Mars
Candidate 22: Elysium Planitia, west of Athabasca Valles
Strong · roughly 85%
What changed. A dark core 25 to 30 m across, inside a halo about 100 m across, appeared on flat lava plates west of Athabasca Valles between August 2008 and June 2021. It is in all five images since, from five orbits: very dark until 2025 and fainter in 2026.
Why it may be a new impact. The August 2008 image, taken under the same sun as the 2021 one, would have shown it clearly and shows nothing. Five orbits and varied sun directions rule out shadows, frost and camera glitches, and a round core-and-halo spot that fades slowly is how impact scars behave. The window is long only because no CTX image was taken in between.
- Location
- 7.003° N, 150.279° E
- Absent
- 25 August 2008
- Present
- five images from 8 June 2021 to 3 May 2026
- Size
- Dark core 25 to 30 m across, inside a halo about 100 m across
- Confidence
- Strong candidate; roughly 85% that it is a new impact.
- Caveat
- It is the one candidate that matches both the area and the dates searched by a catalogue of new impacts near the InSight lander (Bickel et al. 2025), which could not be downloaded, so it may already be listed there. That is less likely because, five years on, it still lies outside every footprint of the high-resolution HiRISE camera, and the catalogue’s authors request a HiRISE image of every impact they confirm. Like every candidate here, it is unconfirmed: see the caveat.
