USGS

Tethys

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 model
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).

Tethys has a huge canyon system, Ithaca Chasma, that is 3 km deep, up to 100 km wide, and extends three-quarters of the way around the satellite. This canyon system is similar in size to Valles Marineris on Mars but occurs on a body only one-sixth the diameter. The formation of the enormous impact crater Odysseus may be related to the origin of the canyon. The moderately to heavily cratered surface indicates all this activity took place early in Tethys' history, and little has happened since. The moderately cratered plains apparently were produced by cryovolcanism similar to that postulated for Enceladus.