Enrico Flamini

University of Chieti-Pescara | UNICH · Department of Engineering and Geology (InGeo)

We present a White Paper with a science theme concept of ocean world evolution and habitability proposed in response to ESA’s Voyage 2050 Call with a focus on Titan and Enceladus in the Saturn system. Ocean worlds in the outer Solar System that possess subsurface liquid water oceans are considered to be prime targets for extra-terrestrial life and...

The SIMBIO-SYS (Spectrometer and Imaging for MPO BepiColombo Integrated Observatory SYStem) is a complex instrument suite part of the scientific payload of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter for the BepiColombo mission, the last of the cornerstone missions of the European Space Agency (ESA) Horizon + science program.The SIMBIO-SYS instrument will provid...

The presence of liquid water at the base of the Martian polar caps has long been suspected but not observed. We surveyed the Planum Australe region using the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, a low-frequency radar on the Mars Express spacecraft. Radar profiles collected between May 2012 and December 2015, contain evidence...

Montagnais is an impact crater located entirely beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean about 100 km south of the shoreline of Nova Scotia, completely hidden at any remote sensing observation. It was discovered in the mid-70s when oil company was looking for reservoir in that area.

The Zapadnaya impact structure, recognized in 1975, is placed in the western part of the crystalline basement rocks of the Ukrainian shield and about 65 km NE of the city of Vinnitsa. It is an extensively eroded crater, 3.2 × 2.23 km in diameter and up to 260 m deep.

The Manicouagan structure of Quebec is a complex impact crater formed within crystalline metamorphic and igneous rocks of Canadian Shield from 1170 to 1700 Ma old, which were metamorphosed about 1000 Ma ago by Grenville Orogeny.

The Upheaval Dome of SW Utah originated by collapse of a transient cavity formed by an impact. This unique feature of Canyonlands National Park is eye-catching among geological features mostly formed from water erosion of sedimentary rock.

At 100-km S of the southern edge of the Ungava Bay in Quebec, La Moinerie is a roughly circular complex impact structure with an 8 km diameter filled by a lake with the same name (Gold et al. 1978; Robertson and Grieve 1975). Highly eroded by glaciation, it still shows the remnant of the central peak identified with the central islands.

The buried Eagle Butte crater, not visible in either optical or radar images, is located in southern Alberta. This crater has little or no surface expression and was first proposed in 1962 due to the faulting pattern on the surface later recognized geophysically and only recently, in 2005, officially recognized as impact crater with the finding of...

The Calvin structure is a complex impact crater shallowly buried below the land of south-western Michigan, where it has minimal or no surface expression in optical images.

Middlesboro structure in Kentucky is named after the city of Middlesboro that is nestled inside the crater rim. It is located next to the Triple Frontier area with Tennessee and Virginia, between Pine Mountain and the Cumberland Mountains in the Middlesboro Basin.

Located on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, the Haughton impact structure was first explored in 1950s but only in 1975 defined as complex impact structure with central uplift after the finding of shatter cones (Robertson and Grieve 1975; Frisch and Thorsteinsson 1977). Today it is one of the most studied impact structures due to the high releva...

Despite being considered as an exposed crater, Haviland crater is now unrecognizable topographically since it has been completely excavated and subsequently filled in, so that it was possible to locate it thanks only to the family who lived close to the structure for ages (Nininger and Figgins 1933; Nininger 1971; Hodge 1979).

The shatter cones found in the late 2000s in an area at least 3 km² in extent 12 km northeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with petrographic evidence of low shock-metamorphic levels indicate the presence of a so far unknown, deeply eroded impact structure that is between 300 Ma and 1 Ga in age and a minimum final crater diameter of ~6–13 km.

At 130 km SW of Ottawa, in the Precambrian, crystalline and metasedimentary late Precambrian or early Cambrian target rock lies the impact structure of Holleford (Beals 1960; Andrieux and clark 1969).

Ile Rouleau is a roughly circular 1-km-wide island located in the southern sector of the elongated Lac Mistassini, the larger natural lake of Quebec (St. John 1968; Hodge 1994).

The Marquez Dome in Texas is a shallow buried complex impact crater that early investigators interpreted as uplift overlying a salt dome. The salt diapiric origin has been ruled out by drilling and seismic reflection data within the area that presents exposure of Cretaceous sediments in a 1.2 km diameter disturbed zone, surrounded by shallow dippin...

Even after the rapid drop in crater production rate after the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, the impact cratering has remained the most common surface-shaping process for all the solid bodies of our Solar System. All the inner bodies in our Solar System show clear evidence of the bombardment that characterize the early stage of their history bu...

The Rock Elm Structure is a circular disturbed area, clearly recognizable in the radar image, about 6 km in diameter, located in otherwise undisturbed flat-lying Paleozoic sandstones and limestones about 300 m thick, which overlie Precambrian metasediments and felsic volcanics.

Located 90 km straight east of the Deep Bay crater in the Saskatchewan region, the Gow crater is roughly circular lake with the prominent Calder Island, 1.5 km high and 35 m wide, defined as its central uplift.

Located 30 km S of Fort Stockton in Texas and about at an equal distance from the borders with Mexico and New Mexico, Sierra Madera is an impact structure of about 13 km in diameter.

The ~25-m-diameter Steen River impact structure is a not-exposed crater remnant of the largest known impact crater in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. The eroded crater lies buried under ~200 m of cover with no surface expression necessitating geophysical and drilling projects for its exploration.

The Zeleny Gai structure is a small-buried crater on the Ukrainian shield covered by about 50 m of Cenozoic sand and clays.

The Maple Creek structure, discovered in the early 1990s south-southeast of Maple Creek, has a 6 km diameter and is barely recognizable at the surface and poorly visible in the radar image (Gent et al. 1992; Grieve et al. 1998).

The Vepriaj structure is in east-central Lithuania, north of Vilnius. It is not exposed, and no part of its structure is visible at any wavelength (Grieve 1991).

Nicholson structure, in eastern Northwest Territories 30 km from the Nunavut border, is an impact crater filled by the Nicholson Lake.

The Presqu’ile structure of central southern Quebec is emplaced on Archean crystalline rocks.

Located in Manitoba, between Manitoba Lake and Winnipeg Lake, which are 22 and 37 km far, respectively, the Saint Martin is a largely buried complex impact structure that has no topographic expression.

Located in Newfoundland and Labrador next to the Quebec border, Mistastin is a central peak basin structure. It hosts an elliptical 11 × 18 km lake of the same name, which in turn hosts the 120-m-high arc-shaped Horseshoe Island identified as the central uplift (Currie 1968; Hodge 1994; Robertson and Grieve 1975). Outward a 50-m-high rim surrounds...

The heavily eroded structure of Ternovka lies in the southern part of the Ukrainian shield and was identified of impact origin in early 80 with the discovery of coesite, stishovite, impact diamond, and shatter cones.

The Beaverhead impact structure is located in USA on the border between Montana and Idaho. The crater is extremely eroded due to its age: U-Pb and ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar data gave an age of 900 million years meanwhile trace fossil evidence provided an age of about 600 million years.

Wanapitei structure is an impact crater located NW of the Sudbury structure. It is filled by a lake, which has a half-circular shoreline, well identifiable in the image, in the northern part that became carved by glaciation in the southern sector.

Glover Bluff consists of three hills that rise about 35 m above the surrounding countryside. The crater area is located about 10 km NNW of the town of Westfield, Wisconsin. Aside from their geological interest (Ekern and Thwaites 1930), they have been important economically as the site of quarries that have mined the dolomite of Lower Ordovician ag...

West Hawk is a lake-filled impact structure located in SE Manitoba, just few hundred meters from the Ontarian border.

The Whitecourt crater, located in central Alberta, is a simple bowl-shaped structure 36 m in diameter having a depth of approximately 6 m (Herd et al. 2008).

Impact craters are formed by the transfer of energy from the meteorite to the target body. Kinetic energy is the energy of motion and depends on the mass and the velocity of the impacting object.

The Serpent Mound impact structure is located in Ohio and, like all complex craters, contains a central peak of structurally uplifted material. This peak of deformed upper Ordovician to middle Silurian-aged carbonate rock is surrounded by a circular graben of middle Silurian—lower Mississippian sedimentary rock. Circumferential normal faults of thi...

Manson structure in Iowa is the largest impact in the USA with its diameter of 35 km (Hartung and Anderson 1998).

The Carswell in northwestern Saskatchewan just S of Lake Athabasca was firstly noticed in 1965 from its about 50 m high circular rings of deformed and fractured high ridges of dolomite. Its impact origin is confirmed by the presence of shatter cones, planar deformation features, pseudotachylyte veins, and impact melts and breccias.

The Crooked Creek structure, located in Missouri, is one of the many circular disturbed areas in the Midwestern US that were originally thought to be cryptovolcanic in nature. In the early 1960s, even after shatter cones were found there (and before shatter cones were considered definitive evidence of impact-induced shock), it was still considered...

Decaturville is located in central Missouri and is a complex crater of about 6 km and an age in between 270 and 320 Ma (Dulin and Elmore 2006). It lies on the Salem Plateau of very flat bedded carbonates in strong contrast to the chaotic stratigraphy of its impact site of overturned and overthrust sequences. The main features of the structure are t...

The peculiar nature of this feature in northern Tennessee was first noted as long ago as 1869. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, it was thought to be a Cryptovolcanic structure. However, in 1957 (Conrad et al. 1957), a detailed study suggested that a more likely explanation is that it consists of the highly eroded remnants of an...

The Elbow structure located in south-central Saskatchewan, north of the village of Riverhurst and south of the town of Elbow, is 8 km in diameter and was discovered during a search for oil and identified as an impact with the discovery of PDFs in quartz (Demille 1960; Goudie 1956).

The Clearwater Lakes occupy two contiguous impact crater situated in crystalline bedrock of the Canadian shield.

Located 9 km of the northern shore of the Lake Superior, Slate Islands are a 7–8-km-wide group of two large islands, five minor islands, and numerous islets, representing the central uplift of an eroded remnant of complex impact crater.

Located in the northern part of middle Tennessee 28 km from Kentucky, Walls Creek structure was confirmed as impact structure in the 60s when shatter cones were found.

Avak crater is a roughly circular area of uplifted, chaotically deformed Upper Triassic to Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks 8 km in diameter that is bounded by a ring of anastomosing, inwardly dipping, listric normal faults 12 km in diameter.

Located in Northern Saskatchewan, the Deep Bay is identified as an anomalous feature of Reindeer Lake since this impact structure is circular, 200 m deep and with no island in it; meanwhile, the rest of the 250-km-long Lake is shallower, about 50 m deep, and full of islands.

The Ames structure is an hidden crater located in northwestern Oklahoma (centered at about 36° 15′ N, 98° 12′ W) at 2.75 km below the surface on top of the Cambro–Ordovician Sylvan shale, which is overlain by Middle Ordovician Oil Creek Formation shale.

Couture Meteorite Crater is located 145 km southwest of the Pingualuit Crater in northern Quebec, and the Couture Lake is of 16 km diameter while the crater is submerged and occupies the central island-free portion of the 120 m deep. The 25-m central uplift present in the lake implies the structure is a complex meteorite crater.

Pilot structure, of southern northwest territories near the border with Alberta and Saskatchewan, is an impact crater, filled by the water of Lake Pilot.

The circular Cloud Creek structure in central Wyoming, USA is buried beneath 1200 m of Mesozoic sedimentary rocks and has a current diameter of 7 km (Schmieder et al. 2014).

Located in the Canadian Shield 228 km WNE of Ottawa and north of the nearby village with the same name, Brent is an impact structure first discovered in 1951 by aerial photographs.

Chesapeake Bay impact structure is one of the largest impact structures on the Earth. It is buried beneath the lower part of the Chesapeake Bay and probably is one of the best-preserved marine impact craters. The structure, discovered only in 1983 during oil exploration when tektites and shocked quartz have been found, is 35.3 Myr old and approxima...

The 3-km-diameter Newporte structure is a buried crater located close to the USA–Canada border in North Dakota in Precambrian igneous and metamorphic basement rock beneath 3 km of overlying material. It was discovered due to hydrocarbon exploration in the late 1970s (Clement and Mayhew 1979; Forsman et al. 1996).

The Viewfield impact structure was discovered 420 km east to Winnipeg, Canada, in 1972 during oilfield drilling activity. It is 2.4 km in diameter, and 100 m deep from the top of the rim to the bottom of the structure, and it is from the Early Jurassic period, about 190 million years ago.

The Kentland structure of NW Indiana is a buried complex impact crater exposed almost only for quarrying activity, not recognizable from remote sensing.

The understanding of what we can observe nowadays needs the comprehension of the processes that contributed to shape our planet and the rest of the Solar System. The history of our Solar System began inside a great cold nebula of gas and dust (Safronov 1969). The more abundant elements were helium and hydrogen, and minor quantities of heavier eleme...

The Red Wing Structure of West North Dakota, 35 km from Montana border, is completely buried under 2000 m of younger materials.

Regional geological mapping of the glaciated surface of northwestern Victoria Island in the western Canadian Arctic revealed, in otherwise flat-lying Neoproterozoic and lower Paleozoic carbonate rocks, an anomalous structure roughly circular, approximately 25 km in diameter.

The New Quebec structure located in far Northern Quebec just 90 km from Hudson Strait is an impact crater first localized from a warplane during WWII in 1943 and then identified of impact origin by aerial photographs. It was the first structure in Canada for which an impact origin was proposed.

Located in the suburb of Chicago, which O’Hare International Airport lies near its southern edge, the Des Plaines impact structure is a buried complex crater with any surface expression. Silurian rocks surround the roughly circular disturbed area where structural derangement is complex, with many high-angle normal faults but without any overturning...

Charlevoix structure is a large meteorite crater located 100 NE of Quebec City half-astride of the St. Lawrence River. It is Ordovician in age, and later thrusting fault lines along the St. Lawrence River obliterated the south-eastern portion of the crater. Its origin identification through shatter cones came in 1965. Later, impact breccia, shock m...

The Sudbury Structure is the oldest and largest impact structure in North America, and is situated in Ontario in a unique geotectonic setting between the Archean-age (>2.5 Ga) Superior Geologic (to west and north) and the Proterozoic-age (>1.9 Ga) Southern Geologic (to west, south, and east).

The Chicxulub Crater experienced a somewhat backward discovery history. For most impact structures, the crater was found first, and then, the ejecta were identified. For Chicxulub, however, the ejecta were identified more than 10 years before the crater was found. The probable ejecta are the famous Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) boundary layer that was...

Odessa is the largest of a group of five meteorite craters located in W Texas, 60 km from the border with New Mexico, 14 km SW of the city of Odessa.

The Barringer Crater is situated near Winslow, Arizona, and is one of the best preserved and studied impact craters in the world. The crater was excavated some 49,000 years ago by the impact of an iron–nickel meteorite which hit the pre-existing Colorado Plateau with a velocity of 11–20 km/s.

Located in the crystalline bedrock of the Stockholm archipelago 200 m below the sea level, the 2000-m-wide almost circular depression of the Tvären impact structure is revealed by continuous seismic reflection profiles.

The Wetumpka structure located in Alabama is a topographically prominent, semi-circular, rimmed feature, composed of relatively high-indurated crystalline rock, forming the rim, and an unconsolidated melange of broken Upper Cretaceous sedimentary formations within and directly outside its crystalline rim on the southern side.

The Glasford structure was recognized as a dome in the 1950s, while exploration for coal was occurring in the region. The top of the dome was found to be at a depth below the surface of 350 m. The local power company took several cores and had a gravity map constructed for the purposes of considering the dome for underground storage of natural gas....

This comprehensive atlas explains the genesis and evolution of impact known craters on Earth, presenting a wealth of radar images from the Italian COSMO-SkyMed satellites that were acquired at the same frequency, spatial resolution, operating mode, and illumination, allowing excellent comparison of different impact structures. It also discusses in...

Liquid water under Mars' southern ice cap Mars is known to host large quantities of water in solid or gaseous form, and surface rocks show clear evidence that there was liquid water on the planet in the distant past. Whether any liquid water remains on Mars today has long been debated. Orosei et al. used radar measurements from the Mars Express spa...

During 2017, INFN-LNF's SCF_Lab Team carried out the final activities of manufacturing, qualification for space flight and integration of LaRRI on the NASA-JPL's spacecraft InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), which is scheduled to fly to Mars in 2018. LaRRI is the second microreflector array of i...

In 2010, the study proposal called Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) was selected by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). ARM had, as its main goal, the ambition to give a feasible, and realistic from a budget standpoint, destination to NASA Human Space Exploration (HSE) after the Internati...

Rosetta observes sublimating surface ices Comets are “dirty snowballs” made of ice and dust, but they are dark because the ice sublimates away, leaving some of the dust behind on the surface. The Rosetta spacecraft has provided a close-up view of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it passes through its closest point to the Sun (see the Perspect...

During Summer 2015 the SCF_Lab (Satellite/lunar/GNSS laser ranging/altimetry and cube/microsat Characterization Facilities Laboratory, www.lnf.infn.it/esperimenti/etrusco) Team of INFN-LNF, with support by ASI, carried out an intense activity of final design, manufacturing and testing in order to construct, space qualify and finally integrate INRRI...

Although water vapour is the main species observed in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and water is the major constituent of cometary nuclei, limited evidence for exposed water-ice regions on the surface of the nucleus has been found so far. The absence of large regions of exposed water ice seems a common finding on the surfaces of many...

In this paper we describe the installation and first light of a coaxial dual-feed X-Ka band receiver on the primary focus of Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) to perform an experimental verification of our antenna potential capabilities in Space Science. The SRT is a 64-m dish antenna operated by INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics-Italy) in Sar...

The High Resolution Imaging Channel (HRIC) of SIMBIO-SYS [1] onboard the BepiColombo mission to Mercury, is the visible imaging camera devoted to the detailed characterization of the Hermean surface. The potential huge amount of data that HRIC can produce must cope with the allocated (and shared) mission resources in terms of power, data volume, an...

The VIRTIS (Visible, Infrared and Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) instrument on board the Rosetta spacecraft has provided evidence of carbon-bearing compounds on the nucleus of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The very low reflectance of the nucleus (normal albedo of 0.060 ± 0.003 at 0.55 micrometers), the spectral slopes in visible and infrared...

In August 2014 ESA’s Rosetta mission has started the exploration of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet nucleus. VIRTIS-M, the Visible InfraRed Thermal Imaging Spectrometer, onboard the orbiter (Coradini et al., 2007) has acquired the entire nucleus’ illuminated hemisphere in the 0.25-5.1 µm spectral range from a heliocentric distance of 3.2 AU. These...

The paper will describe the major results obtained during the comet nucleus characterization phase, July-August 2014, of the Rosetta Mission by the instrument VIRTIS (Visible, Infrared and Thermal Imaging Spectrometer), the dual channel spectrometer onboard Rosetta. The nucleus observations in this phase were performed in a wide range of illuminati...

The VIRTIS (Visible, Infrared and Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) spectrometer has observed the nucleus of 67P using its full spectral range extending from 0.25um up to 5um. The spatial sampling has increased from about 500m down to about 15 m, from the second half of July throughout August. Most of the illuminated area has been already mapped, albei...

SIMBIOSYS is a highly integrated instrument suite that will be mounted on-board BepiColombo, which is the fifth cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency dedicated to the exploration of the planet Mercury and it is expected to be launched in 2016. The SIMBIOSYS instrument consists of three channels: the STereo imaging Channel (STC), with bro...

[1] We construct the depth profile—the bathymetry—of Titan's large sea Ligeia Mare, from Cassini RADAR data collected during the 23 May 2013 (T91) nadir-looking altimetry fly-by. We find the greatest depth to be about 160 m and a seabed slope that is gentler towards the northern shore, consistent with previously imaged shoreline morphologies. Low r...

Since the days of the beginning of our species, the process of trying to understand the very nature of the stars, the Moon, the planets and the Earth itself is still a work in progress. Only in the last five decades, we have acquired the capability to observe the Earth from outside, to land on another planet or to detect the radiation emitted by an...

BepiColombo is an upcoming joint ESA/JAXA mission to Mercury. In particular the High Spatial Resolution Camera (HRIC), part of the SIMBIO-SYS (Spectrometer and Imagers for MPO Bepicolombo Integrated Observatory - SYStem) instrument suite, will characterize in detail the surface of the planet. In this work the BepiColombo rotation experiment is anal...

We address the issue of the possible susceptibility of typical aircraft electronics exposed to particle, gamma-ray and neutron irradiation coming from Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGF). We consider possible scenarios regarding the intensity, the duration, and geometry of TGFs influencing a nearby aircraft, and study their effects on electronic eq...

Over the last eight years, the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) aboard the Cassini orbiter has returned hyperspectral images in the 0.35-5.1 micron range of the icy satellites and rings of Saturn. These very different objects show significant variations in surface composition, roughness and regolith grain size as a result of their ev...

LARES (LAser RElativity Satellite) is a laser-ranged satellite deployed by the Italian Space Agency (ASI). It is a spherical satellite covered with 92 retro-reflectors with a radius of 182 mm. Made of tungsten alloy, its weight is 386.8 kg, making it likely the highest mean density body in the Solar System. LARES was launched on the 13th of Februar...

The authors present the tradeoff and the merit criteria that lead to the selection of the M. Brunn [1] "un obscured four mirrors based telescope" as the collimator of the Optical Ground Support Equipment in the frame of the Assembly Integration and Verification (AIV) activities forecast for the optical characterization of the High Resolution Camera...

In the last few years Cassini-VIMS, the Visible and Infared Mapping Spectrometer, returned to us a comprehensive view of the Saturn's icy satellites and rings. After having analyzed the satellites' spectral properties (Filacchione et al. (2007a)) and their distribution across the satellites' hemispheres (Filacchione et al. (2010)), we proceed in th...