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
Impact crater vapor cloud may rise to many times the scale height of the atmosphere, effectively expanding into free space. Most material ejected from the crater is deposited within a few crater radii, but a small fraction may travel large distances at high velocity, and in large impacts it may exceed escape velocity and leave the impacted planet or moon entirely. The majority of the fastest material is ejected from close to the center of impact, and the slowest material is ejected close to the rim at low velocities to form an overturned coherent flap of ejecta immediately outside the rim. As