Austin Blevins

Cratermaker is currently under development at Purdue University. It is a spherical impact bombardment model that serves as the spiritual successor to CTEM. Where CTEM’s domain is a square grid with a fixed grid size and a repeating boundary condition, Cratermaker’s grid is spherical with variable grid size. This allows for variable-resolution runs, which can be useful for modeling mare-scale craters and impact bombardment in the South Polar region, among other things.

Above is an image of a Cratermaker simulation using the Losiak et al. crater database (available here) as input craters. This particular database has age information for each crater, so craters were sorted by age and emplaced oldest to youngest.

Cratermaker is still under development and is expected to release sometime in 2024. The lead developer is my advisor, Dr. David Minton. The development team includes Dennise Valadez, Dr. Jun Du, and myself. I can’t wait to use Cratermaker in my research!