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Enceladus · Sulcus · 3rd largest named feature

Harran Sulci

City where Khudadad's father ruled.

What Harran Sulci is

Harran Sulci is a sulcus — a set of parallel grooves and ridges — on Enceladus, 291 km across, centred at 26.4° N, 114.1° E. It is the 3rd largest named feature on Enceladus and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

City where Khudadad's father ruled. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1982, under the theme it applies to every sulcus on Enceladus.

Feature class
a set of parallel grooves and ridges
Diameter
291 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
26.4° N, 114.1° E
Planetocentric, on Enceladus
Name approved
1982
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Arabian
Asia

What it would take to settle Harran Sulci

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 26.4° N, 114.1° E.

Settlement difficulty here
54.8/ 100
Typical for this world
Enceladus overall
54.8
Exactly typical
Ranked
44th
of 85 named places on Enceladus

What this spot has going for it is water same as everywhere else on this world. What works against it is temperature about -195 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Harran Sulci'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 sulcus features on Enceladus

All 20 sulci on Enceladus — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.