Crater production on Titan and surface chronology

TL;DR

This study models impact crater production on Titan to estimate surface ages and assess the impact of atmospheric shielding and erosion, revealing large craters can survive over Solar System timescales while smaller ones are often obliterated.

Contribution

It introduces a crater production model considering centaur impactors and atmospheric effects, providing new insights into Titan's surface chronology and erosion processes.

Findings

Large craters (>50 km) can persist over Solar System age.

Smaller craters are often erased by erosion.

Atmospheric shielding affects crater size distribution.

Abstract

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 surface of Titan, revealing an unexpected scarcity of impact craters that show high levels of degradation. Following previous studies on impact cratering rates on the Saturnian satellites, we modeled the cratering process on Titan to constrain its surface chronology and to assess the role of centaur objects as its main impactors. A theoretical model previously developed was used to calculate the crater production on Titan, considering the centaur objects as the main impactors and including two different slopes for the size-frequency distribution (SFD) of the smaller members of their source population. A simple model for the atmospheric shielding effects is considered within the cratering process and our results are then compared with other synthetic crater distributions and updated observational crater counts. This comparison is then used to compute Titan's crater retention age for each crater diameter. The cumulative crater distribution produced by the SFD with a differential index of $s_2 = 3.5$ is found to consistently predict large craters (D > 50 km) on the surface of Titan, while it overestimates the number of smaller craters. As both the modeled and observed distributions flatten for craters with $D \lesssim 25 $ km due to atmospheric shielding, the difference between them can be considered as a proxy for the scale to which erosion processes have acted on the surface of Titan throughout the Solar System age. Our results for the surface chronology of Titan indicate that craters with D > 50 km can prevail over the Solar System age, whereas smaller craters may be completely obliterated due to erosion processes acting globally.