Description of the attraction
145 km southwest of Alice Springs, there are several craters that were formed by the collision of fragments of a meteorite with the earth's surface - today this place is known as the Henbury Meteorites Sanctuary. It is one of five places in Australia where debris has been found, and one of the finest examples of a small crater field in the world. There are 13 to 14 craters ranging from 7 to 180 meters in diameter and up to 15 meters deep. Several tons of iron-nickel fragments of the meteorite were collected from the territory. It is believed that the catastrophe occurred about 4, 7 thousand years ago, when a meteorite at a speed of 40 thousand km / h crashed into the ground.
The crater field got its name from a nearby pasture, which in 1875 was occupied by a family of natives of the English town of Henbury. And the craters themselves were discovered in 1899, but for many years they remained unexplored, until in 1930 another meteorite, Karunda, fell in the state of South Australia. This shocked the public, and the first scientists went to Henbury. Already in 1932, a certain AR Alderman published a scientific work "Henbury Meteorite Craters in Central Australia", in which he described his research in detail.
