What to do during the confinement? Become a crater hunter!

Participate in the search for new impact craters with Vigie-Cratère, the third component of the Vigie-Ciel citizen science project. During your long hours of confinement, you can travel all around our planet, discover the world of impact craters, and help scientists to better reconstruct the history of collisions with Earth.
Although the Earth has been bombarded almost uniformly since the beginning of its long history, the geographical distribution of known terrestrial impact craters is inhomogeneous over the different continents. Of the about 200 known impact structures on Earth, more than half are located in Europe and North America.
Vigie-Cratère offers you the opportunity to become a crater hunter, thanks to a new search protocol based on topographic data, so-called “shaded relief” which can reveal circular depressions invisible on standard satellite imagery.
For all the structures identified, you will have the possibility to vote and give your opinion on their nature by comparing satellite imagery and topographic data. The platform also provides the opportunity to discuss the collected data and the preliminary results.
These data will be useful to launch dedicated scientific field missions. All data are open and available to all researchers wishing to study the identified structures and develop research programs. The scientific publications will associate the participants having contributed to the identification of new impact structures.

To start the crater hunt, go to: http://www.vigie-cratere.org
Facebook: www.facebook.com/vigiecratere
Instagram: vigie_cratere

Vigie-Cratère is part of the Vigie-Ciel program supported by the National Museum of Natural History in partnership with the University of Paris Saclay, IRD, Paris Observatory, Universcience, Grenoble Alpes University, the Pythéas Institute, the Natural History Museum Vienna, and the CNRS. It has been financed by Investissements d’avenir as part of the 65 millions d’observateurs project.