The meteorite crashed in the Namib Desert about 5 million years ago, leaving a large hole in the red sand.
The Expedition 62 astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) took a photo of Roter Kamm crater as it flew over the Namib Desert, one of the world’s oldest, SciTechDaily reported on February 19. This meteorite hole is approximately 130 m deep and 2,500 m in diameter.
Geologists believe that an asteroid the size of a large car passed through Earth’s atmosphere and crashed in the Namib Desert about 5 million years ago. The impact hole he created was gradually covered with red and orange grains of sand blown by the wind.
Over billions of years, many asteroids rushed through Earth’s atmosphere and left “scars” in the form of craters. Over 100 tonnes of material from near-Earth objects, including rock fragments and debris from asteroids or comets ranging in diameter from dust to 1 meter in diameter, bounce around the planet every day blue. Humans sometimes catch them glow and rot in the middle layer, becoming “meteors”, before they reach the ground.
Meteors that cause severe damage to the Earth’s surface are very rare. They only appear once every 2000 years or so. Meteors are large enough to trigger extinction events, such as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction event, hitting the Earth’s surface every few million years.
