Sind Sulci
What Sind Sulci is
Sind Sulci is a sulcus — a set of parallel grooves and ridges — on Enceladus, 116 km across, centred at 16.4° S, 107.3° W. It is the 22nd largest named feature on Enceladus and the 14th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
City in the tale "The Merchantâs Daughter and the Prince of Al-Irak." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2010, under the theme it applies to every sulcus on Enceladus.
What it would take to settle Sind 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 16.4° S, 107.3° W.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 96% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Enceladus gets. What works against it is temperature — about -194 °C mean at this latitude.
Computed from Sind 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.