USGS


Enceladus

Saturnian System

 All of Saturn's larger satellites are made
mostly of water ice with some lesser rock component. With the
exception of Enceladus, whose surface appears to be virtually
pure ice, these moons' surfaces are made of dirty ice, with models
suggesting increasing amount of rocky material toward their centers.
Enceladus, Tethys, and Dione all exhibit widely varied crater
densities and large canyons, indicating that they have all been
substantially affected by geologic activity. A likely geologic
process on these icy bodies is cryovolcanism, which involves partial
melting of an icy satellite's interior and resultant outpourings
of icy liquids. Ammonia-water cryovolcanism is widely suspected
on all three objects, because the amount of heat available to
drive geologic activity there is very meager, and ammonia-water
ices (an expected component of Saturnian satellites) have a very
low melting point, 176 K (-97 oC).

Enceladus has a density only slightly more than that of pure water and is the least dense Saturnian satellite, therefore the least rocky of all the icy satellites yet known. Evidence of geologic activity abounds; its ridged terrain, for example, is so sparsely cratered (of the icy satellites, only Europa is less cratered) that some geologists believe it may still be active. Enceladus also has some very heavily cratered terrain, and terrain with intermediate crater densities, indicating that it has had a protracted history of geologic activity. Tectonic activity is evidenced by mountains 1 to 2 km high, strike-slip faults, normal faults, and folded strata. All these indicate that large blocks of Enceladus' surface have shifted relative to one another. As with Io and Europa, the driving energy for this activity may be the tidal interactions from orbital resonance-in this case Dione and Saturn causing the tidal heating that led to partial melting and softening of the interior.