Modeling Impact Cratering on Titan

ROSSIGNOLI, NATALIA L.; M.G. PARISI; DI SISTO, ROMINA P.

Congreso; 11th Planetary Crater Consortium Meeting; 2020

Lunar and Planetary Institute Universities Space Research Association.

Titan is the second largest satellite in the Solar System and the only one known to possess a dense atmosphere. Before the Cassini mission, its crater size distribution was unknown but estimated to be similar to those of the other Saturnian satellites. Instead, Cassini observations uncovered an unexpected low number of eroded craters [1]. Using a theoretical model previously developed andapplied to the small and mid-sized saturnian satellites [2?4], we model the impact cratering process on Titan and calculate its crater size distribution. We then compare our results with the updated crater counts obtained using the Cassini Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) dataset [5] and compute the surface age for each crater diameter.