Surface Features
See also: List of geological features on 243 Ida and DactylIda's surface appears heavily cratered and mostly gray, although minor color variations mark newly formed or uncovered areas. Besides craters, other features are evident, such as grooves, ridges, and protrusions. Ida is covered by a thick layer of regolith, loose debris that obscures the solid rock beneath. The largest, boulder-sized, debris fragments are called ejecta blocks, several of which have been observed on the surface.
Read more about this topic: 243 Ida
Famous quotes containing the words surface and/or features:
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)