Definition
A region of planetary surface consisting of closely packed, overlapping craters
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Heavily cratered terrain, or sometimes just “cratered terrain,” has been used as a terrain mapping unit on various icy satellites, for example, for regions on Dione (Moore 1984) and most of Callisto (Schenk 1995) or Rhea (Moore et al. 1985; Fig. 1). As defined for Mercury (Trask and Guest 1975), heavily cratered terrain consists of both arrays of closely packed overlapping craters and isolated craters exceeding 30 km diameter that are sufficiently old for neither their ejecta blankets nor their associated fields of secondary impact craters to still be visible.
Heavily cratered terrain on Rhea, a satellite of Saturn. Y: Yu-Ti crater. Cassini Orbiter ISS N1710086684_1 centered 58°N 84°W (NASA/JPL/SSI)
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References
Moore JM (1984) The tectonic and volcanic history of Dione. Icarus 59:205–220
Moore JM, Horner VM, Greeley R (1985) The geomorphology of Rhea: implications for geologic history and surface processes. J Geophys Res 90(S02):C785–C795. doi:10.1029/JB090iS02p0C785
Schenk PM (1995) The geology of Callisto. J Geophys Res 100:19023–19040
Trask NJ, Guest JE (1975) Preliminary geologic terrain map of Mercury. J Geophys Res 80:2461–2477
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Rothery, D.A. (2014). Heavily Cratered Terrain. In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_229-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_229-1
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