Color Images of Eros

sbuckhopper writes, "CNN.com has an article about how NASA was able to get the first ever color picture of an asteroid. These photos were taken with NASA's Near Earth Rendezvous spacecraft, and allow more of the asteroid landscape to be viewed than ever before. "

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Relationship of Cratering to Age

[Anomalous Canard]

From the caption to this image.

Inside the gouge, however, only smaller craters are present, indicating that the area within the gouge is younger than the surface along the terminator.

I know that the general rule is that the more densly cratered a surface, the older it is. This tells us that the surface of Europa is very young while the surface of nearby Callista is older. But might it not be strictly true in this case?

It seems to me that the gouge is somewhat sheltered so that the proability of it being hit is something less that proportional to the surface area exposed. Consider the extereme case of an object shaped like a bowl. The inside and outside surfaces of a bowl are of roughly equal areas, but it seems to me that the probability of a strike on the outside of a bowl is higher than the probability of a strike on the inside of a bowl because the outside obscures the inside more often than vice versa.

Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected