Morphometric Study of Craters on Saturn’s Moon Rhea

Abstract

Abstract Morphometric studies of impact craters on icy moons can be used to understand modification of crater topography. Several processes (e.g., viscous relaxation, ejecta deposition, repeated and overlapping impacts) act to shallow crater depth and relax the crater wall slope to similar or varying extents. Resolving these processes can help constrain the interior structure and surface properties of icy moons. Here, using morphometric measurements of craters on Rhea, we aim to constrain the processes that led to the observed crater population. We measured crater diameter, depth, and wall slope, as well as overall crater morphology (e.g., simple versus complex craters). Our results indicate that there exists a linear correlation between impact crater depth-to-diameter ratio and crater wall slope. This may suggest that the dominant modification process on Rhea is one that affects both properties simultaneously, which supports past heating events as the primary post-impact modification process. Additionally, the simple-to-complex crater transition for Rhea was found to be 12 ± 2 km, which is consistent with reported transition diameters for comparably sized icy bodies, indicating similar surface properties. A transition to shallower crater depths for large complex craters was not documented, indicating the absence of a rheological transition at depth in Rhea’s icy lithosphere, which may support the interpretation that Rhea is not fully differentiated.