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How does Mercury’s stronger gravity affect the material thrown out by an impact?
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Meteorite crater
Four impact craters of the same size (30 km [20 miles] in diameter) imaged by spacecraft on different solid bodies of the solar system and reproduced at the same scale. They are (clockwise from upper left) Golubkhina crater on Venus, Kepler crater on the Moon, an unnamed crater on Jupiter's moon Ganymede, and an unnamed crater on Mars. The images are oriented such that the craters appear illuminated from the left; the Venusian crater is imaged in radar wavelengths, the others in visible light.
Mercury’s stronger surface gravity—which is more than twice that of the Moon—significantly restricts the distance that ejected material can travel following an impact. Specifically, this material travels only about 65 percent of the distance it would reach on the Moon.1
This gravitational effect is considered a contributing factor to the prominence of secondary craters on Mercury, which are formed by the impact of this ejected material rather than by the primary asteroid or comet impact itself.1