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Europa · Chaos · 92nd largest named feature

Arran Chaos

Island where Manannán had a palace.

What Arran Chaos is

Arran Chaos is a chaos — terrain broken into a jumble of blocks and hollows — on Europa, 26 km across, centred at 13.4° N, 80.5° W. It is the 92nd largest named feature on Europa and the 8th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Island where Manannán had a palace. 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
26 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
13.4° N, 80.5° W
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 Arran 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 13.4° N, 80.5° W.

Settlement difficulty here
59.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Europa overall
60.9
1.2 easier than the median site
Ranked
21st
of 129 named places on Europa

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 97% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Europa gets. What works against it is ground broken ground — hard to reach, and worth reaching for the shelter and the exposed strata.

Computed from Arran 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