Saturn's icy satellites and rings investigated by Cassini - VIMS. III. Radial compositional variability

TL;DR

This study analyzes Cassini-VIMS spectral data to map the compositional and surface property variability of Saturn's icy satellites and rings, revealing significant differences in water ice, contaminants, and surface characteristics across the system.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive radial compositional analysis of Saturn's satellites and rings using spectral data, including new classifications and Hapke modeling of surface properties.

Findings

Enceladus and Calypso are water ice-rich and uncontaminated.

Iapetus and Phoebe surfaces are metal/organic-rich and red.

Rings are more red and have deeper 1.5-2.0 micron bands.

Abstract

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. (2007a)) and their distribution across the satellites' hemispheres (Filacchione et al. (2010)), we proceed in this paper to investigate the radial variability of icy satellites (principal and minor) and main rings average spectral properties. This analysis is done by using 2,264 disk-integrated observations of the satellites and a 12x700 pixels-wide rings radial mosaic acquired with a spatial resolution of about 125 km/pixel. The comparative analysis of these data allows us to retrieve the amount of both water ice and red contaminant materials distributed across Saturn's system and the typical surface regolith grain sizes. These measurements highlight very striking differences in the population here analyzed, which vary from the almost uncontaminated and water ice-rich surfaces of Enceladus and Calypso to the metal/organic-rich and red surfaces of Iapetus' leading hemisphere and Phoebe. Rings spectra appear more red than the icy satellites in the visible range but show more intense 1.5-2.0 micron band depths. The correlations among spectral slopes, band depths, visual albedo and phase permit us to cluster the saturnian population in different spectral classes which are detected not only among the principal satellites and rings but among co-orbital minor moons as well. Finally, we have applied Hapke's theory to retrieve the best spectral fits to Saturn's inner regular satellites using the same methodology applied previously for Rhea data discussed in Ciarniello et al. (2011).