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Enceladus · Dorsum · 30th largest named feature

Ebony Dorsum

City in the "Tale of Kamar Al-Zaman."

What Ebony Dorsum is

Ebony Dorsum is a dorsum — a ridge — on Enceladus, 70 km across, centred at 5.7° N, 79.5° E. It is the 30th largest named feature on Enceladus and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

City in the "Tale of Kamar Al-Zaman." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every dorsum on Enceladus.

Feature class
a ridge
Diameter
70 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
5.7° N, 79.5° E
Planetocentric, on Enceladus
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Arabian
Asia

What it would take to settle Ebony Dorsum

Enceladus scores 54.8 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 5.7° N, 79.5° E.

Settlement difficulty here
53.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Enceladus overall
54.8
1.1 easier than the median site
Ranked
19th
of 85 named places on Enceladus

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 99% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Enceladus gets. What works against it is temperature about -193 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Ebony Dorsum's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 68% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 3 axes were dropped as not applicable to Enceladus (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Enceladus 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 dorsum features on Enceladus