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Enceladus · Crater · 59th largest named feature

Samad

Shayk who guides Musa and Talib to the mountains in "The City of Brass".

What Samad is

Samad is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Enceladus, 15 km across, centred at 61.7° N, 1.2° W. It is the 59th largest named feature on Enceladus and the 27th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Shayk who guides Musa and Talib to the mountains in "The City of Brass". The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1982, under the theme it applies to every crater on Enceladus.

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
15 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
61.7° N, 1.2° W
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 Samad

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 61.7° N, 1.2° W.

Settlement difficulty here
57/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Enceladus overall
54.8
2.2 harder than the median site
Ranked
70th
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 -207 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Samad'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.