Modeling the formation of Selk impact crater on Titan: Implications for Dragonfly

TL;DR

This study simulates impact crater formation on Titan to understand Selk crater's features and melt pools, providing insights relevant for NASA's Dragonfly mission's search for biosignatures.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical model of Selk-sized impact craters on Titan considering methane clathrate layers, revealing how layer thickness affects melt pool formation and distribution.

Findings

A 4 km impactor creates a Selk-sized crater with melt pools.

Melt volumes are consistent across different methane layer thicknesses.

Melt pool shape and depth depend on methane clathrate layer thickness.

Abstract

Selk crater is an $\sim$ 80 km diameter impact crater on the Saturnian icy satellite, Titan. Melt pools associated with impact craters like Selk provide environments where liquid water and organics can mix and produce biomolecules like amino acids. It is partly for this reason that the Selk region has been selected as the area that NASA's Dragonfly mission will explore and address one of its primary goals: to search for biological signatures on Titan. Here we simulate Selk-sized impact craters on Titan to better understand the formation of Selk and its melt pool. We consider several structures for the icy target material by changing the thickness of the methane clathrate layer, which has a substantial effect on the target thermal structure and crater formation. Our numerical results show that a 4 km-diameter-impactor produces a Selk-sized crater when 5-15 km thick methane clathrate layers are considered. We confirm the production of melt pools in these cases and find that the melt volumes are similar regardless of methane clathrate layer thickness. The distribution of the melted material, however, is sensitive to the thickness of the methane clathrate layer. The melt pool appears as a torus-like shape with a few km depth in the case of 10-15 km thick methane clathrate layer, and as a shallower layer in the case of a 5 km thick clathrate layer. Melt pools of this thickness may take tens of thousands of years to freeze, allowing more time for complex organics to form.