Landsat 9 photographs Australia's Spider Crater, an ancient impact with 'legs'

NASA's Earth Observatory picked a fittingly spooky Image of the Day for October: Spider Crater, an ancient meteorite impact structure in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

What the satellite saw

The picture was taken on 20 September 2026 by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the joint NASA–USGS Landsat 9 satellite. The whole impact structure is oval, about 13 by 11 kilometres (8 by 7 miles). Its spider-like centre is about 4 kilometres across.

Where the "legs" come from

Geologists think the spider pattern is what is left of a central uplift: the part of a crater floor that springs up as the ground rebounds right after an impact. The pale "legs" are sandstone ridges that resisted erosion while the rock around them wore away over hundreds of millions of years.

How scientists proved it was an impact

For decades after its discovery, the feature's origin was debated, and some researchers suggested a volcanic past. The answer came from fieldwork. Geologists found shatter cones, fan-shaped fractures that only form when intense shock waves pass through rock, and they are common in the crater's central dome.

Later lab work on shocked quartz and zircon crystals from the sandstone helped reconstruct the angle at which the meteorite hit.

How old is it?

The exact date of the impact is unknown. Based on rocks in the area, NASA says it happened between roughly 900 million and 600 million years ago, in the late Precambrian, long before complex animal life spread across the planet.

Why it is worth a look

Old impact craters on Earth are hard to spot because weather, water and plate tectonics wipe them away. Landsat's long-running archive lets scientists, and anyone else, study such structures in detail from orbit. The full-resolution image is free to download from NASA's Earth Observatory.