Pitted Material from Tooting Crater

Tooting Crater is one of the youngest craters on Mars that is larger than 20-kilometers in diameter. Relatively low areas inside and outside the crater are covered by a distinctive pitted and ponded material. The pits are not impact craters, as they lack ejecta and are very closely spaced.

There is one small impact crater near the lower right corner of our picture, which is much more circular than the pits and has a raised rim and ejecta. One interpretation is that this pitted and ponded material was hot impact ejecta from Tooting, and loss of volatiles from this material or underlying materials created the pits as it cooled.

The map is projected here at a scale of 50 centimeters (19.7 inches) per pixel. (The original image scale is 58.0 centimeters [22.8 inches] per pixel [with 2 x 2 binning]; objects on the order of 174 centimeters [68.5 inches] across are resolved.) North is up.

The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.