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Enceladus · Rupes · 7th largest named feature

Samaria Rupes

Place in the tale "Khudadad and His Brothers."

What Samaria Rupes is

Samaria Rupes is a rupes — a scarp or cliff — on Enceladus, 193 km across, centred at 26.9° N, 134.9° E. It is the 7th largest named feature on Enceladus and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Place in the tale "Khudadad and His Brothers." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015.

Feature class
a scarp or cliff
Diameter
193 km
about 1.8 times shorter than the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
26.9° N, 134.9° E
Planetocentric, on Enceladus
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Persian
Asia

What it would take to settle Samaria Rupes

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 26.9° N, 134.9° E.

Settlement difficulty here
55.4/ 100
Typical for this world
Enceladus overall
54.8
0.6 harder than the median site
Ranked
55th
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 Samaria Rupes'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