Impact event such as Engelier and Gerin on Iapetus, Mamaldi on Rhea and Odysseus on Tethys and Herschel on Mimas form significant surface features. 2018 models developed to explain the unusual spin of Uranus support a long-held theory that this was caused by an oblique collision with massive object twice the size of Earth. On July 1994, Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was a comet that broke apart and collided with Jupiter, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects. The event served as a "wake-up call", and astronomers responded by starting programs such as Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 carbon disulfide persisted in the atmosphere for at least fourteen months after the collisions, with a considerable amount of ammonia being present in the stratosphere as opposed to its normal location in the troposphere. Counterintuitively, the atmospheric temperature dropped to normal levels much more quickly at the larger impact sites than at the smaller sites: at the larger impact sites, temperatures were elevated over a region wide, but dropped back to normal levels within a week of the impact. At smaller sites, temperatures higher than the surroundings persisted for almost two weeks. Global stratospheric temperatures rose immediately after the impacts,