The image was taken on May 16, 2022 at Tenoumer Crater in Mauritania, one of the best-preserved craters on Earth
One of the best-preserved craters on Earth is located deep in the Sahara Desert. On Asteroid Day, the Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite mission takes us over Mauritania's near-perfect circular Tenumer Crater.
Tenumer Crater, visible in the center of the image, is 1.9 km (1.2 miles) wide. The rim of the crater rises about 110 m (360 ft) above the bottom, but the bottom of the crater is covered with sediment layers about 200 to 300 m (650 to 980 ft) thick.
Whether this crater was formed by a volcano or a meteorite has long been controversial. The rocks scattered around the crater resemble basalt, however, a closer examination of the structure revealed that the hardened "lava" of the crater was actually rock that had been melted by a meteorite impact.
The crater sits on a vast plain of rocks that are so old that they were deposited hundreds of millions of years before the first dinosaurs walked the earth. Even though it's in the middle of an ancient rock, Tenoumer is much younger, between the ages of 10,000 and 30,000.
This Sentinel-2 false color image taken on May 16, 2022, shows the arid landscape around the crater, showing different shades of brown, tan, and orange.
Asteroid Day is the United Nations-approved public awareness day on the risk of asteroid impact, held annually on 30 June. More than a million asteroids have been discovered in the solar system, and many more are expected. ESA's Office of Planetary Defense, ESA's Near-Earth Object Coordination Center, and astronomers around the world are working to keep us safe, working together to make sure we know in advance if an asteroid was detected during a collision.