लाइव
Titan · Macula · 108th largest named feature

Eir Macula

Norse goddess of healing and peace.

What Eir Macula is

Eir Macula is a macula — a dark spot — on Titan, 145 km across, centred at 24.0° S, 114.7° W. It is the 108th largest named feature on Titan and the 6th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Norse goddess of healing and peace. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every macula on Titan. Of the 7 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Slavic (2), Greek (1), Aztec (1), India (1).

Feature class
a dark spot
Diameter
145 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
24.0° S, 114.7° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Norway
Europe

What it would take to settle Eir Macula

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 24.0° S, 114.7° W.

Settlement difficulty here
32.3/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.3 easier than the median site
Ranked
58th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 92% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Eir Macula'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 macula features on Titan