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Mars · Albedo Feature

Niliacus Lacus

"Lake of the Nile."

What Niliacus Lacus is

Niliacus Lacus is an albedo feature — a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance — on Mars, centred at 29.7° N, 30.0° W in the Oxia Palus quadrangle.

Where the name comes from

"Lake of the Nile." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1958.

Feature class
a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance
Diameter
Not catalogued
Coordinates
29.7° N, 30.0° W
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
1958
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Oxia Palus
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Niliacus Lacus

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 29.7° N, 30.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
26/ 100
Typical for this world
Mars overall
26.6
0.6 easier than the median site
Ranked
477th
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 88% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Niliacus Lacus'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 albedo feature features on Mars