Small Crater Populations on Enceladus and Hyperion

Details Small Crater Populations on Enceladus and Hyperion Small Crater Populations on Enceladus and Hyperion

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.2504b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #25.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.996

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We will present our latest crater measurements for Enceladus and Hyperion, along with interpretations and constraints on deriving an impactor population from the crater data.
Continuing measurements of small crater populations on Enceladus young terrains and Hyperion demonstrate a shallow (> -3) differential slope for the crater size-frequency distributions (SFDs).
We focus our measurements on these objects because they should be largely free of secondary craters, which add noise to the primary crater signal. (Enceladus young terrains because they are insufficiently old to accumulate a significant population of secondaries, and Hyperion because its low surface gravity is too low to retain ejecta of sufficient velocity that would form secondaries.) Given the measured SFDs are in fact free of non-primary crater contamination, the current impactor flux through the saturnian system should express an equivalent SFD.
Measurements on young Enceladus terrains reveal crater density variations from zero craters (within a large area around the south pole) to lightly cratered. Heavily cratered terrains on Enceladus (at equatorial and northern latitudes) demonstrate steeper slopes, implying either changes in impactor flux SFD with time, or the addition of non-primary sources (e.g. secondaries) to the crater populations. Our measurements are consistent with those of Kirchoff and Schenk (2009) [Icarus, v. 202], who found variations in crater SFD as a function of location and terrain type.

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