My doctoral thesis work spans a large portion of the research I have done with Mars crater over the past few years, so I thought it appropriate for now to tie it together on a single page rather than provide references throughout the research page.
My thesis comprised of four main sections. The first and second are currently being turned into papers, while the last two were already published or submitted works. I provide the full download link or individual sections, depending upon what you are interested in. My thesis should be referenced as:
Robbins, S.J. (2011). Planetary Surface Properties, Cratering Physics, and the Volcanic History of Mars from a New Global Martian Crater Database. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Note on downloading: There are a lot of 300ppi raster images which is why the downloads are so large. The down-sampled version was simply put through Adobe Acrobat's "Reduce File Size" filter.
Full thesis download (133 MB).
Full thesis download with down-sampled figures (15 MB).
Important Note (as of April 2012): Now that the thesis has been accepted, in full, to various journals, the reference that should be made when citing the Mars crater database is:
Robbins, S.J., and B.M. Hynek (2012). A New Global Database of Mars Impact Craters ≥1 km: 1. Database Creation, Properties, and Parameters. Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, 117, E05004. doi: 10.1029/2011JE003966.
Front Matter (Title page, signature page, abstract, dedication, acknowledgements, table of contents, list of tables, and list of figures) (0.2 MB)
Section 1: An Introduction to Cratering (1.0 MB)
This is a pretty good introduction to the cratering process, history of the solar system, and why craters are important.
Section 2: A New Global Database of Mars Impact Craters to 1 km: 1. Database Creation, Properties, and Parameters (8.3 MB)
This is superseeded by a paper that was accepted for publication in March 2012, the draft of which can be found here. All Appendixes from the original thesis are included in this paper.
Section 3: A New Global Database of Mars Impact Craters to 1 km: 2. Global and Regional Properties and Their Implications to Gravity Scaling (29.5 MB)
This is superseeded by a paper that was accepted for publication in April 2012, the draft of which can be found here.
Section 4: Secondary Craters from Near and Far (22.2 MB)
Contains one page introduction before getting into two papers I wrote.
Section 4.1: Distant Secondary Craters from Lyot Crater, Mars, and Implications for Ages of Planetary Bodies
This is a very slightly updated version of my GRL paper by the same name. I suggest just sticking with the GRL version. The changes are: (1) Around p. 116 a sentence was added about Coriolis being ignored and the reference used is Skinner & Nava's 2011 LPSC abstract since that directly addresses this; (2) Figure 35 (p. 118) R-plot added; (3) Figure 36 (p. 120) R-plots changed to be log-log; (4) around p. 121 a distance comparison in units of crater radii was added for Lyot vs. Zunil secondaries.Section 4.2: Close Secondary Crater Fields from 24 Primary Craters, Mars, and Prospects for Understanding Nearby Secondary Crater Production
This paper had not yet come back from review by the time my thesis was due, so it contained a final first submission draft. It has since been revised per reviewer comments and accepted for publication by JGR-Planets. I recommend that version.
Section 5: The Volcanic History of Mars: High-Resolution Crater-Based Study of the Calderas of Twenty Volcanoes (62.2 MB)
My first crater-related published paper was the last chapter of the thesis. It's a cut-and-paste of my volcano work, but it was slightly added to. No significant new content was added, though. It's a toss-up as to which you may want to download -- the Icarus version is a smaller file size and nicely formatted, but it doesn't have the minor changes. The changes from the Icarus paper are:
- Around p. 159 (middle of section 5.2.4): Added a sentence about why the Neukum isochrons were used (because they were used in all works to which comparisons were made). Also added Neukum and Hiller 1981 reference.
- Around p. 191 (end of Apollinaris discussion, section 5.6): Softened language about conclusiveness of secondary craters and added references to Section 4.2 work.
- Around p. 195 (beginning of section 5.8.1): Added a sentence that the fields are not likely due to breakup as suggested in some cases by Popova et al. (2007).
- Around p. 208 (end of conclusions): Added Wood and Ashwal (1981) and Mouginis-Mark et al. (1992) to references for where the SNC meteorites may have originated.
- Created additional R-plot versions of several figures. These are Fig. 50, 51, 54, 55, around pages 169, 174, 196, and 197. I did not end up doing a version of the Hecates HiRISE/CTX comparison (fig. 52, p. 188) because the R-plot version simply looks like a straight downward slope with 1 crater per bin scaled by area. It does not show any kind of new information and I think the CSFD shown illustrates the point, that CTX and HiRISE are comparable over the CTX resolution range.
- Around p. 201: Inserted a new figure of a histogram of number of caldera eruptions on Mars through time.
- Around p. 205 (towards the end of the discussion): Added text per Nick about the inserted figure.
- Around p. 178: Added text stating why the two tiny calderas in Pavonis Mons were not dated (too small and too few craters).
Section 6: Discussion (0.3 MB)
Summary of what's new and different and what's incremental.
References (0.7 MB)
Fourteen whole pages of them, single-spaced. And yet my committee told me that I was "missing" some (I'm guessing they knew of key papers for certain previous results and if they saw that those papers weren't there, took issue). Style was Icarus with no text formatting (no italics, bold, underline).
Appendix A (0.3 MB)
A detailed list and description of all data columns in the database.
Appendix B (0.5 MB)
Details on the ellipse-fitting algorithm, and a flow chart.
Appendix C (2.7 MB)
Archetypal examples of interior crater morphologies.
Appendix D (5.5 MB)
Archetypal examples of crater ejecta morphologies.