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Ganymede · Catena · 122nd largest named feature

Khnum Catena

Egyptian creation god.

What Khnum Catena is

Khnum Catena is a catena — a chain of craters — on Ganymede, 66 km across, centred at 32.9° N, 10.7° E. It is the 122nd largest named feature on Ganymede and the 4th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Egyptian creation god. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1997, under the theme it applies to every catena on Ganymede. Of the 4 features of this class catalogued on Ganymede, the naming categories run Assyro-Babylonian (2), Phoenician (1), Egypt (1).

Feature class
a chain of craters
Diameter
66 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
32.9° N, 10.7° E
Planetocentric, on Ganymede
Name approved
1997
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Egypt
Africa

What it would take to settle Khnum Catena

Ganymede scores 55 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 32.9° N, 10.7° E.

Settlement difficulty here
56.2/ 100
Typical for this world
Ganymede overall
55
1.2 harder than the median site
Ranked
120th
of 196 named places on Ganymede

What this spot has going for it is water same as everywhere else on this world. What works against it is temperature about -161 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Khnum Catena's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 84% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Ganymede (earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Ganymede 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 catena features on Ganymede