ICY SATELLITES: A MULTI-SCALE ANALYSIS TO UNDERSTAND THEIR TECTONICS

The icy satellites, such as Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede or Saturn’s Enceladus, are first class targets for future missions focused on the search of biosignatures in the Solar System. In fact, evidence of subsurface oceans indicates that such bodies may harbor potentially habitable environments and the investigation of the surface features contributes to their detection. The icy satellites show widespread deformation structures that provide insights to infer the tectonics and the mechanical properties of their crusts. Such structures represent discontinuities between crustal layers and conduits for fluid circulation that connect the surface with the deep layers, such as the ocean. Therefore, structural investigation is pivotal for the understanding of icy satellite geology, which still presents open issues. Their surfaces show a large amount of extension and strike-slip that require balancing, which is not fulfilled by the paucity of compression recognized at present. Several approaches have been proposed to unravel the tectonics of the icy satellites from remote sensing of data acquired by the past missions to the support of terrestrial analogs. We show tectonic models that allow to explore multi-scale investigations of the deformation structures of the icy satellites, and in particular of Ganymede, which is the main target of the JUICE mission.