[astro-ph.EP]. Interpreting Enceladus’s past and present surface history and interior state remains challenging, owing to uncertain prescription of its impact bombardment history and limited interpretation of its crater statistics.
Further progress in understanding its evolutionary history can be achieved with an improved crater chronology model and a thorough assessment of Enceladus’s surface. Here we present the first step in the form of a comprehensive, global crater catalogue with geomorphology survey for Enceladus. From our dataset we build the crater production function (CPF), which is the underlying, unmodified crater size-frequency distribution of the satellite surface, assuming no subsequent modification.
We obtained the CPF with a data-driven approach; therefore it makes no assumptions about the impactor source population or planet evolution models or the timing of impact. We fit the CPF with a high-order polynomial as is customary for the Moon and Mars, capturing the slope variations across different crater diameter ranges.
The Enceladian CPF generally has a steeper cumulative slope than that of the Moon and Mars for small crater diameters D_cr < 10 km, as well as that of the size-frequency distribution of trans-Neptunian objects. This CPF serves as a critical observational input for an Enceladian crater chronology model, enabling the conversion of crater densities into absolute surface ages.
Extending the crater cataloguing and CPF derivation of this study to other Saturnian satellites will determine whether the Enceladian CPF is unique; a shared CPF would indicate a common impactor population, providing observational constraints on the size-frequency distribution of small bodies in the outer Solar System.
Division of our units on Enceladus. (A) in equirectangular projection from 90°N to 90°S, and (B) and (C) in polar stereographic from pole to 30° latitude in the north and south poles, respectively. Unit names follow the convention: “Far” or “Near” denotes the far or near side, “Mid” or “Eq” the mid-latitude or equatorial region, and “CP” the cratered plain. Due to space constraints, not all units are labelled with full names. The prefix “RP” for ridged plains from Kirchoff and Schenk (2009) is omitted. Colour variations (dark red and yellow) distinguish between “Mid” (for mid-latitude) and “Eq”’ (for equator) without repeated labelling. Units in the north pole defined in this work are labelled in black. Units referencing Kirchoff and Schenk (2009) are in blue, while those referencing Crow-Willard and Pappalardo (2015) are in white. — [astro-ph.EP]
E. W. Wong, S. C. Werner, M. R. Kirchoff, R. Brasser
Comments: Main paper 30 pages, Supplementary Section 20 pages, accepted for publication in Icarus
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.14814 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2608.14814v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14814
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Submission history
From: Emily Wong
[v1] Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:37:22 UTC (47,742 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14814
astrobiology, astrogeology,
