Mosul Sulci
What Mosul Sulci is
Mosul Sulci is a sulcus — a set of parallel grooves and ridges — on Enceladus, 60 km across, centred at 58.1° S, 23.3° E. It is the 31st largest named feature on Enceladus and the 19th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
City where Isaac was pulled up in a basket to a mansion and four damsels in the tale âIsaac of Mosul.â The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every sulcus on Enceladus.
What it would take to settle Mosul 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 58.1° S, 23.3° E.
What this spot has going for it is water — same as everywhere else on this world. What works against it is temperature — about -205 °C mean at this latitude.
Computed from Mosul 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.