Chicxulub impactor Chicxulub impactor The Chicxulub impactor ( ), also known as the K/Pg impactor and (more speculatively) as the Chicxulub asteroid, was an asteroid or other celestial body some in diameter which struck the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago, creating the Chicxulub crater. It impacted a few miles from the present-day town of Chicxulub in Mexico, after which the impactor and its crater are named. Because the estimated date of the object's impact and the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary) coincide, there is a scientific consensus that its impact was the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
Wilkes Land crater researchers led by Ralph von Frese and Laramie Potts of Ohio State University. The team used gravity measurements by NASA's GRACE satellites to identify a wide mass concentration and noted that this mass anomaly is centered within a larger ring-like structure visible in radar images of the land surface beneath the Antarctic ice cap. This combination suggested to them that the feature may mark the site of a wide impact crater buried beneath the ice and more than 2.5 times larger than the Chicxulub crater. Due to the site's location beneath the Antarctic ice sheet there are no direct samples