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Enceladus · Crater · 54th largest named feature

Morgiana

Clever slave girl in the tale "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves."

What Morgiana is

Morgiana is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Enceladus, 15.4 km across, centred at 31.7° N, 163.8° E. It is the 54th largest named feature on Enceladus and the 22nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Clever slave girl in the tale "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2009, under the theme it applies to every crater on Enceladus.

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
15.4 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
31.7° N, 163.8° E
Planetocentric, on Enceladus
Name approved
2009
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Arabian
Asia

What it would take to settle Morgiana

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 31.7° N, 163.8° E.

Settlement difficulty here
54.2/ 100
Typical for this world
Enceladus overall
54.8
0.6 easier than the median site
Ranked
28th
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 -196 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Morgiana'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 crater features on Enceladus

All 53 craters on Enceladus — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.