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Australia's bizarre 'Spider Crater' seen from orbit | Space photo of the day for Oct. 22, 2026
Somewhere in the vast Western Australia wilderness lies a giant "spider" trapped in an ancient impact crater.
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From the dangerous Sydney funnel-web to the common huntsman, Australia is home to its fair share of spiders. It even has a crater shaped like one.
One stretch of the vast Western Australia wilderness is imprinted with a curious crater, which likely formed after a meteor impact hundreds of millions of years ago. Geologists think the spider-like pattern in the crater's center was created when its floor rebounded following the initial impact, NASA has said.
In the hundreds of millions of years since the initial impact, erosion has continued to carve this formation into its current, signature shape. Complete with "legs," the planetary imprint has earned its name Spider Crater.
This image shows the impact structure in its entirety, which stretches 8 by 7 miles (13 by 11 kilometers) in full, with the central "spider" piece measuring 2.5 miles (4 km).
In this image, we can see this "spider" from space. This snapshot shows the geologic feature as captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard the Landsat 9 satellite, an Earth-observing craft that launched back in 2021.
The satellite, a collaborative effort between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, is the ninth in the Landsat Earth-observing series, which goes all the way back to the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. On a near-weekly basis, Landsat 9 delivers observations of everything from deforestation to water quality and crop growth.
The series of Landsat satellites have been a critical piece in the modern understanding of how our planet continues to change. Whether it's the repercussions of climate change or fluctuations in agriculture, observations from orbit do more than provide interesting photos of our home world; they also capture critical data.
Chelsea Gohd served as a Senior Writer for Space.com from 2018 to 2022 before returning in 2026, covering everything from climate change to planetary science and human spaceflight in both articles and on-camera in videos. With a M.S. in Biology, Chelsea has written and worked for institutions including NASA JPL, the American Museum of Natural History, Scientific American, Discover Magazine Blog, Astronomy Magazine, and Live Science. When not writing, editing or filming something space-y, Gohd is writing music and performing as Foxanne, even launching a song to space in 2021 with Inspiration4. You can follow her online @chelsea.gohd and @foxanne.music