Karoo (crater) Karoo (crater) Karoo is an impact crater on the Asteroid 253 Mathilde, named for the Great Karoo Basin, a coal basin in South Africa. It is 33.4 kilometers in diameter and was the most prominent crater seen during NEAR Shoemaker's Flyby of the Asteroid. The critical crater diameter is the scale at which cratering “goes global” and results in a solitary distinct crater. All smaller craters—however large D might be—are local events. Mathilde is thus a particularly interesting case, since it is the largest asteroid imaged at sufficient resolution to show that its topography is clearly exogenic, governed by impacts.
Karoo the mountains, but are very secretive, so are rarely seen. Many of the animals that formerly inhabited the Karoo in large numbers, including lions, have been reintroduced to the area in nature reserves and game farms. As in the Great Karoo, antelope and other big game inhabited the Little Karoo in the past. However, the dominant zebra was not the quagga, but the Cape mountain zebra, ("Equus zebra zebra") which is adapted for life on rugged, mountainous terrain. Their hooves are harder and faster-growing than those of Burchell’s zebra ("Equus quagga burchellii"), which lives on the plains. The two species