A new Landsat 9 view shows why Western Australia's Spider Crater looks like a giant arachnid, and how geologists proved a meteorite made it.
NASA's Landsat 9 satellite has captured a new image of Spider Crater, an ancient impact site in the Kimberley region of Western Australia that looks like a giant spider from above.
It matters because it shows how erosion can disguise old craters. Scientists spotted the feature in the 1950s, but only the discovery of shatter cones, rock fractures caused by extreme shock, proved in the late 1970s that a meteorite made it. Lab work on shocked crystals is still filling in details such as the angle of the strike.
From space, it looks like a giant spider is sprawled across the Australian outback. It isn’t a creature, of course. Spider Crater is the scar of a meteorite that hit Western Australia between about 900 million and 600 million years ago, and NASA’s Landsat 9 satellite has just captured a sharp new picture of it.
Why should you care about an ancient hole in a remote corner of Australia? Because Spider Crater shows how hard it is to spot old impacts at all. Most of us picture a crater as a neat round bowl, like the ones on the Moon. On Earth, wind, water and time wipe those bowls away. What’s left can look like almost anything, including a spider, and it took scientists decades to work out what this one really was.
The Operational Land Imager on Landsat 9, a satellite run jointly by NASA and the US Geological Survey, took the picture on September 20, 2026. The full impact structure is an oval roughly 13 kilometers by 11 kilometers, or about 8 by 7 miles. The spider-shaped center is about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) wide.
In the image, pale ridges spread out from a central mound like legs from a body, set against reddish rock. Small patches of green vegetation dot the area, growing thickest along a thin stream that winds diagonally across the crater.
NASA’s Earth Observatory published the picture as the answer to its October Puzzler, a mystery-image challenge for readers.
The spider shape didn’t appear the moment the meteorite hit. It formed slowly over hundreds of millions of years.
When a large space rock strikes the ground, the shock wave pushes the crater floor down and then lets it spring back up, a bit like the middle of a trampoline rebounding. That rebound creates a raised area called a central uplift. Geologists think Spider Crater’s “body” is what remains of that uplift.
The “legs” are ridges of sandstone, a tough rock that resists erosion. Over the ages, wind and water stripped away the softer rock layers around them. The sandstone stayed standing, leaving the pale, radiating ridges that give the crater its name.
Spider Crater was first noticed in the 1950s, and for years nobody could agree on what made it. Some researchers thought it was volcanic.
The answer came in the late 1970s, when geologists working in the field found shatter cones. These are cone-shaped, fan-patterned fractures in rock that form only when intense shock waves pass through it, the kind produced by an impact. They turned out to be everywhere in the crater’s central dome. Badly distorted layers of sedimentary rock added to the evidence.
Lab work has since gone further. By studying shocked quartz and zircon crystals in the sandstone, scientists can work out details of the impact, including the angle at which the meteorite came in.
Nobody knows exactly. Estimates based on rocks in the region put the impact between about 900 million and 600 million years ago, in the late Precambrian. That was long before complex animals were widespread, when Earth’s continents looked very different from today.
Why such a wide range? Dating an impact this old is hard. Scientists usually rely on minerals such as zircon, which holds traces of uranium that slowly turn into lead at a steady rate, so the ratio between the two works like a clock. But over hundreds of millions of years, heat and later geological events can reset or blur that clock, leaving researchers with a window instead of a single date.
Western Australia is a hot spot for ancient impact sites. Earlier this year, researchers reported that the North Pole Dome in the Pilbara region, also known as the Miralga impact structure, formed about 3.02 billion years ago. That would make it the oldest known asteroid impact site on Earth, though scientists have argued over its age, and Spider Crater is young by comparison.
Spider Crater is a reminder that Earth has been hit far more often than its surface suggests. Most ancient craters have been worn down, buried or recycled by moving continents, so the few that survive are precious records of how often space rocks strike.
Satellites make a real difference here. The site is rugged and remote, and its pattern is best seen from the air. Long-running missions like Landsat let scientists and curious readers spot features like this without trekking into the Kimberley, and then send field teams to the places that look promising.
If you want to explore it yourself, the free satellite map views on most mapping apps show the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Look for the pale, leggy pattern on the Kimberley Plateau.
It’s in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, on the Kimberley Plateau, and is easiest to see from the air or in satellite images.
The whole impact structure is an oval about 13 by 11 kilometers (8 by 7 miles), and the spider-shaped center is about 4 kilometers across.
Yes. Shatter cones in its central dome, which form only under extreme shock, confirmed an impact origin in the late 1970s.
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