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Titan · Virga · 33rd largest named feature

Bacab Virgae

Mayan rain god.

What Bacab Virgae is

Bacab Virgae is a virga — a coloured streak — on Titan, 485 km across, centred at 19.0° S, 151.0° W. It is the 33rd largest named feature on Titan and the 7th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Mayan rain god. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every virga on Titan. Of the 8 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Zuni (1), Arabian (1), Lithuania (1), New Zealand (1).

Feature class
a coloured streak
Diameter
485 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
19.0° S, 151.0° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Mayan
South and Central America

What it would take to settle Bacab Virgae

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 19.0° S, 151.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
32.4/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.2 easier than the median site
Ranked
109th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 95% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Bacab Virgae'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 virga features on Titan