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Venus · Rupes · 295th largest named feature

Ut Rupes

Siberian; Turco-Tatar goddess of the hearth fire.

What Ut Rupes is

Ut Rupes is a rupes — a scarp or cliff — on Venus, 676 km across, centred at 55.3° N, 38.1° W in the Lakshmi Planum quadrangle. It is the 295th largest named feature on Venus and the 5th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Siberian; Turco-Tatar goddess of the hearth fire. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1982, under the theme it applies to every rupes on Venus. Of the 7 features of this class catalogued on Venus, the naming categories run Lithuania (2), Roman (2), Caucasus (1), Turkmenistan (1).

Feature class
a scarp or cliff
Diameter
676 km
about the length of Italy
Coordinates
55.3° N, 38.1° W
Planetocentric, on Venus
Name approved
1982
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Lakshmi Planum
Map sheet on Venus
Naming category
Turkmenistan
Asia

What it would take to settle Ut Rupes

Venus scores 43 as a world. That number is the same for every square metre of it — but sunlight, water, radiation and the ground under your feet are not. This is the same question asked at 55.3° N, 38.1° W.

Settlement difficulty here
45.7/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Venus overall
43
2.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
1751st
of 1,985 named places on Venus

What this spot has going for it is known ground 3,415 km from Venera 9 (1975). What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Ut Rupes's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Venus (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Venus and are already counted in the world's own index, not again here.

What this cannot see: elevation. Slope, local shadowing and the polar “peaks of eternal light” — ridge tops near the poles of a barely tilted world that catch sun almost continuously while a crater floor kilometres away never does — need a terrain model this does not have. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually why.

What is next to it

The largest rupes features on Venus