269-13 Expanding Measurements and Interpretations of Enceladus’s Regolith Thicknesses Pole-to-Pole

Session: Planetary Geologic Mapping Across the Solar System (Posters)

Presenting Author:

Authors:

Abstract:

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is well known for the icy water plume erupting from a deeply sourced liquid water ocean. Enceladus is one of the most likely habitable environments in our solar system and has become the gold standard of planetary plumes. Plume material provides an opportunity to study Enceladus’ interior ocean and environment. We do not know how long the plume has been erupting, or how the eruption rate has changed in deep time. Deriving observational constraints on Enceladus’s plume activity as it is preserved in the geologic record is one of the ways we can begin to uncover a detailed record of plume deposition, constrain the properties of the plume material, and derive a minimum volume of water lost from the ocean.

Our recently funded work through the Cassini Data Analysis Program aims to use regolith deposition as a physical record of past plume activity in a way that is agnostic of the transport mechanism for ocean material being entrained into the plume. We will improve measurement density of regolith thicknesses globally across Enceladus’s surface by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, regolith thicknesses will be benchmarked using small mass wasting features. Mass wasting features may also help constrain regolith properties (e.g. density, porosity) which can further help constrain the minimum volume loss from the subsurface ocean through plume eruptions. We will present our work in progress with an emphasis on the global pit chain distribution in the context of the tectonic history of Enceladus. We will also present updates to the regolith distribution map.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-10720

© Copyright 2025 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved.