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Titan · Fluctus · 170th largest named feature

Ara Fluctus

Armenian god famous for his beauty, also known as a resurrected god who dies and is reborn periodically.

What Ara Fluctus is

Ara Fluctus is a fluctus — a flow of erupted material — on Titan, 70 km across, centred at 39.8° N, 118.4° W. It is the 170th largest named feature on Titan and the 5th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Armenian god famous for his beauty, also known as a resurrected god who dies and is reborn periodically. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2007, under the theme it applies to every fluctus on Titan. Of the 5 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run India (1), Indonesia (1), Persian (1), New Zealand (1).

Feature class
a flow of erupted material
Diameter
70 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
39.8° N, 118.4° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2007
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Armenian
Asia

What it would take to settle Ara Fluctus

Titan scores 32.6 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 39.8° N, 118.4° W.

Settlement difficulty here
33.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
1.1 harder than the median site
Ranked
251st
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 80% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Ara Fluctus's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Titan (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Titan 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 fluctus features on Titan