Related papers: Surface ages of mid-size Saturnian satellites
Are Saturn's regular satellites young or old? And how old are Enceladus' cratered plains? To answer these questions we computed model surface ages of the most heavily cratered terrains on Saturn's regular icy satellites using new…
Impact crater counts on the Saturnian satellites are a key element for estimating their surface ages and placing constraints on their impactor population. The Cassini mission radar observations allowed crater counts to be made on the…
The small ($\le$ 135 km mean radius) saturnian satellites are closely related to the rings and together they constitute a complex dynamical system where formation and destruction mechanisms compete against each other. We model the cratering…
At the end of the Cassini mission, Saturn's rings have been claimed to be spectacularly young compared to the age of the Solar System: their unusual ice-rich composition corresponds to initially pure ice rings polluted by interplanetary…
We find evidence that crater ejecta play an important role in the small crater populations on the Saturnian satellites, and more broadly, on cratered surfaces throughout the Solar System. We measure crater populations in Cassini images of…
It is widely accepted that Titan and the mid-sized regular satellites around Saturn were formed in the circum-Saturn disk. Thus, if these mid-sized satellites were simply accreted by collisions of similar ice-rock satellitesimals in the…
The Cassini spacecraft provided key measurements during its more than twelve year mission that constrain the absolute age of Saturn's rings. These include the extrinsic micrometeoroid flux at Saturn, the volume fraction of non-icy…
The origin of Saturn's inner mid-sized moons (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea) and Saturn's rings is debated. Charnoz et al. (2010) introduced the idea that the smallest inner moons could form from the spreading of the rings' edge…
Phoebe is one of the irregular satellites of Saturn; the images taken by Cassini-Huygens spacecraft allowed us to analyze its surface and the craters on it. We study the craters on Phoebe produced by Centaur objects from the Scattered Disk…
The small number of impact craters found on Titan suggests that its surface is relatively young. Previous work estimated its surface age to be between 200 and 1000 Myr. This estimate, however, is based on crater scaling laws for water and…
In the last few years Cassini-VIMS, the Visible and Infared Mapping Spectrometer, returned to us a comprehensive view of the Saturn's icy satellites and rings. After having analyzed the satellites' spectral properties (Filacchione et al.…
The Cassini mission provided key measurements needed to determine the absolute age of Saturn's rings, including the extrinsic micrometeoroid flux at Saturn, the volume fraction of non-icy pollutants in the rings, and the total ring mass.…
We aim to compute the impact rates for objects with a diameter of 1 km onto the regular satellites of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus using our latest dynamical simulations of the evolution of outer solar system coupled with the best estimates…
Pluto's surface displays a wide variety of geologic units from smooth plains to extremely rugged mountainous expanses. These terrains range in age from young, actively resurfaced regions (no observable craters even in the highest-resolution…
We simulate the collision of precursor icy moons analogous to Dione and Rhea as a possible origin for Saturn's remarkably young rings. Such an event could have been triggered a few hundred million years ago by resonant instabilities in a…
Many small moonlets, creating propeller structures, have been found in Saturn's rings by the Cassini spacecraft. We study the dynamical evolution of such 20-50m sized bodies which are embedded in Saturn's rings. We estimate the importance…
The accurate determination of Saturn's gravitational coefficients by Cassini could provide tighter constrains on Saturn's internal structure. Also, occultation measurements provide important information on the planetary shape which is often…
Iapetus, the outermost regular satellite of Saturn, has a drastic albedo dichotomy and an equatorial circumferential ridge that reaches heights of 20 km and widths of 70 km. This moon is thought to have formed concurrently with Saturn, and…
Data from the New Horizons mission to Pluto show no craters on Sputnik Planum down to the detection limit (2 km for low resolution data, 625 m for high resolution data). The number of small Kuiper Belt Objects that should be impacting Pluto…
The Saturn System has been studied in detail by the Cassini-Huygens Mission. A major thrust of those investigations has been to understand how Saturn formed and evolved and to place Saturn in the context of other gas giants and planetary…