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Mars · Vallis · 707th largest named feature

Napo Vallis

River in Ecuador.

What Napo Vallis is

Napo Vallis is a vallis — a valley — on Mars, 87.5 km across, centred at 26.0° S, 78.0° E in the Iapygia quadrangle. It is the 707th largest named feature on Mars and the 115th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

River in Ecuador. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2014, under the theme it applies to every vallis on Mars. Of the 157 features of this class catalogued on Mars, the naming categories run Italy (14), France (12), Greek (10), United States (9).

Feature class
a valley
Diameter
87.5 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
26.0° S, 78.0° E
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
2014
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Iapygia
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
Ecuador
South and Central America

What it would take to settle Napo Vallis

Mars scores 26.6 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 26.0° S, 78.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
28/ 100
Typical for this world
Mars overall
26.6
1.4 harder than the median site
Ranked
1873rd
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 91% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Napo Vallis's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mars (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mars 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 vallis features on Mars

All 157 valles on Mars — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.