Science: Earth has its high-standing continents and low-lying ocean basins, thanks to plate tectonics. And Mars has its smooth northern lowlands and its cratered highlands. But there's no credible sign that plate tectonics ever operated on Mars, so how did a third of the planet come to be as much as 4 kilometers lower than the rest? For the past quarter-century, a leading theory has held that a giant impact battered the young planet and excavated the northern lowlands, but that idea seemed to have serious problems.

Now, two new studies purport to ease the difficulties with a giant impact. In one study, researchers reveal the true dimensions of the huge "Borealis basin," making it look much more like the crater of a giant impact. And a second group has run simulations that suggest how an impactor could have blasted out an 8000-kilometer-wide crater without melting it into an unrecognizable puddle of magma. "I think there's much to recommend [a giant impact] now with all this new work," says Sean Solomon, a planetary geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C.