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Europa · Cavus · 73rd largest named feature

Moyle Cavus

In Celtic mythology, a cold sea where the children of Lir (Llyr), transformed into swans, were forced to spend three hundred years.

What Moyle Cavus is

Moyle Cavus is a cavus — a hollow or irregular steep-sided depression — on Europa, 145 km across, centred at 25.0° S, 168.0° W. It is the 73rd largest named feature on Europa and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

In Celtic mythology, a cold sea where the children of Lir (Llyr), transformed into swans, were forced to spend three hundred years. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2019.

Feature class
a hollow or irregular steep-sided depression
Diameter
145 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
25.0° S, 168.0° W
Planetocentric, on Europa
Name approved
2019
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Celtic
Europe

What it would take to settle Moyle Cavus

Europa scores 60.9 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 25.0° S, 168.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
60.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Europa overall
60.9
0.2 easier than the median site
Ranked
55th
of 129 named places on Europa

What this spot has going for it is water same as everywhere else on this world. What works against it is temperature about -156 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Moyle Cavus'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 Europa (earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Europa 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