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Europa · Macula · 90th largest named feature

Boeotia Macula

Place where Cadmus led cow before it stopped at site of Thebes.

What Boeotia Macula is

Boeotia Macula is a macula — a dark spot — on Europa, 30 km across, centred at 53.6° S, 166.8° W. It is the 90th largest named feature on Europa and the 5th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Place where Cadmus led cow before it stopped at site of Thebes. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1997, under the theme it applies to every macula on Europa.

Feature class
a dark spot
Diameter
30 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
53.6° S, 166.8° W
Planetocentric, on Europa
Name approved
1997
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Boeotia Macula

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 53.6° S, 166.8° W.

Settlement difficulty here
61.5/ 100
Typical for this world
Europa overall
60.9
0.6 harder than the median site
Ranked
81st
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 -168 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Boeotia Macula'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 macula features on Europa