Catherine Corrigan Catherine Corrigan Catherine Margaret Corrigan (born 1972), often known as Cari Corrigan, is an American scientist best known as a curator of the meteorite collection at the Smithsonian Institution. She is a scientist in the Department of Mineral Science at the National Museum of Natural History. Corrigan obtained a Bachelor of Science in 1995 and a Master of Science in 1998, both in Geology at Michigan State University. Her master's thesis was titled "The Composition of Impact Breccias from the Chicxulub Impact Crater, Yucatan Peninsula, Yucatan, Mexico". She later earned a Ph.D in Planetary Science at Case Western Reserve University
Chicxulub crater of bolide-weakened lithostratigraphy around the impact crater wall. More recent evidence suggests the actual crater is wide, and the 180 km ring is in fact an inner wall of it. Researchers at the University of Glasgow dated tektite samples from the impact as 66,038,000 ± 11,000 years old. The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of , and delivered an estimated energy of 21–921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs (between formula_1 and formula_2 joules, or 1.3–58 YJ). By contrast, the most powerful man-made explosive device ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had an energy of only 210 petajoules (formula_3 joules, the yield of