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Europa · Chaos · 95th largest named feature

Narberth Chaos

Chief court of Pwyll; he first saw his future wife Rhiannon at a nearby mound.

What Narberth Chaos is

Narberth Chaos is a chaos — terrain broken into a jumble of blocks and hollows — on Europa, 20 km across, centred at 26.0° S, 87.0° E. It is the 95th largest named feature on Europa and the 9th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Chief court of Pwyll; he first saw his future wife Rhiannon at a nearby mound. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2007, under the theme it applies to every chaos on Europa.

Feature class
terrain broken into a jumble of blocks and hollows
Diameter
20 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
26.0° S, 87.0° E
Planetocentric, on Europa
Name approved
2007
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Celtic
Europe

What it would take to settle Narberth Chaos

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 26.0° S, 87.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
63.2/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Europa overall
60.9
2.3 harder than the median site
Ranked
117th
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 radiation geometry on the trailing hemisphere, which takes the brunt of the bombardment.

Computed from Narberth Chaos'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

The largest chaos features on Europa