Research Questions for the Mars Craters Study (Data Viz - Assignment 1)

I'm interested in the Mars Craters Study, in part because the data is provided by my Alma Matter, CU Boulder, but also because I'm interested in Cartography and Geographic Information Systems.

For a research question, I will explore relationships between Longitude and the distribution of craters on the Mars surface. My hypothesis is that there will be a higher density of craters in the equatorial region plus or minus 25 degrees (the tilt axis of Mars).

All Craters

Crater Names

I created the data exploration images above with Tableau Public, here.

Literature Review

I started with google scholar search terms like "mars craters,"  "crater distribution," and "tilt axis."

Article 1, below, goes into some of the geometry of crater impacts, and seems to provide helpful background information for understanding ejecta. Article 2, below, seems to be a deeper dive into the likelihood of impacts at various angles. Article 3 should talk about how the tilt axis of Mars has changed over time, and might describe how the longitudinal axis or Mars was oriented during the time of the late heavy bombardment.

Article 1

Kneissl, Thomas, Stephan van Gasselt, and Gerhard Neukum. "Map-projection-independent crater size-frequency determination in GIS environments—New software tool for ArcGIS." Planetary and Space Science 59.11 (2011): 1243-1254.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063310000887

Article 2

Gault, Donald E., and John A. Wedekind. "Experimental studies of oblique impact." Lunar and Planetary Science Conference Proceedings. Vol. 9. 1978.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1978LPSC....9.3843G

Article 3

Kargel, Jeffrey S., and Robert G. Strom. "Global climatic change on Mars."Scientific American 275.5 (1996): 80-88.

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v275/n5/pdf/scientificamerican1196-80.pdf;