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Europa · Mensa · 82nd largest named feature

Borvo Mensa

Romano-Celtic (Gallic) god of healing identified with several therapeutic springs and mineral baths.

What Borvo Mensa is

Borvo Mensa is a mensa — a flat-topped elevation with cliff-like edges — on Europa, 49.7 km across, centred at 0.5° S, 134.7° E. It is the 82nd largest named feature on Europa and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Romano-Celtic (Gallic) god of healing identified with several therapeutic springs and mineral baths. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2019, under the theme it applies to every mensa on Europa.

Feature class
a flat-topped elevation with cliff-like edges
Diameter
49.7 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
0.5° S, 134.7° E
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 Borvo Mensa

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 0.5° S, 134.7° E.

Settlement difficulty here
60.6/ 100
Typical for this world
Europa overall
60.9
0.3 easier than the median site
Ranked
50th
of 129 named places on Europa

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 100% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Europa gets. What works against it is radiation geometry on the trailing hemisphere, which takes the brunt of the bombardment.

Computed from Borvo Mensa'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 mensa features on Europa