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Europa · Large ringed feature · 78th largest named feature

Callanish

Stone circle in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

What Callanish is

Callanish is a large ringed feature — a multi-ring impact basin, the largest class of impact structure there is — on Europa, 107 km across, centred at 16.7° S, 25.5° E. It is the 78th largest named feature on Europa and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Stone circle in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1997, under the theme it applies to every large ringed feature on Europa. Of the 2 features of this class catalogued on Europa, the naming categories run Greek (1), Celtic (1).

Feature class
a multi-ring impact basin, the largest class of impact structure there is
Diameter
107 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
16.7° S, 25.5° E
Planetocentric, on Europa
Name approved
1997
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Celtic
Europe

What it would take to settle Callanish

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 16.7° S, 25.5° E.

Settlement difficulty here
60.5/ 100
Typical for this world
Europa overall
60.9
0.4 easier than the median site
Ranked
46th
of 129 named places on Europa

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 96% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Europa gets. What works against it is radiation geometry on the boundary between the leading and trailing hemispheres.

Computed from Callanish'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 large ringed feature features on Europa