View of Enceladus (left), a closeup of the Tiger Stripes (middle), and a plume (right). The middle and left panels are false color images. Cassini’s high-resolution camera images courtesy of CICLOPS and NASA /JPL/Space Science Institute.
Modelling Crustal Deformation for Saturn’s Moon Enceladus using PyLith
Contributed by Alex Berne, California Institute of Technology
Enceladus is a small (~500 km diameter), dynamic, and potentially habitable moon of Saturn (Vance et al., 2023). Enceladus’s plumes, which vent water crystals sourced from a global subsurface ocean, erupt from four prominent, evenly spaced surface fractures – informally called Tiger Stripes – within the satellite’s South Polar Terrain (SPT) (Figure 1). The SPT exhibits anomalously high heat flux and regional crustal thinning (Park et al., 2024); suggesting that interrelated thermo-mechanical phenomena underlie SPT activity (Spencer et al., 2006). Moreover, observed jet activity varies over Enceladus’s tidal cycle with two peaks in activity: one after the satellite reaches apoapsis (i.e., the furthest point in orbit relative to Saturn) and a smaller peak after periapse (i.e., the closest point) (Hedman et al., 2013). These observations suggest that diurnal tides periodically deform Tiger Stripes to enable plume activity. However, the exact mechanism that regulates jet activity along the Tiger Stripes (e.g., tidally induced strike-slip or opening motion) is not well understood.
To explore a potential relationship between the dynamics of the Tiger Stripes and jet activity at Enceladus... [full article]
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