This is very cool: a guy got a grant to comb through satellite imagery to look for terrestrial craters, and found one hidden in plain sight! The Planetary Society has all the details. The man who found it studied geology in college, but is now a systems analyst!
This is a perfect example of citizen science. There’s too much real estate – on Earth and in the sky – for what we normally think of as geologists and astronomers to examine carefully. And this shows there’s plenty of room for “amateurs” to help out… and that word always makes me laugh. I know a lot of amateur astronomers who know far more than I do about pointing a telescope. You’ll almost always find that at their borders, most definitions are pretty fuzzy.
Tip o’ the Whipple shield to David Kessler.
