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Titan · Collis · 137th largest named feature

Gandalf Colles

Wizard, leader of the Fellowship of the Ring; character from Middle-earth, the fictional setting fantasy novels by J. R. R. Tolkien.

What Gandalf Colles is

Gandalf Colles is a collis — a small hill or knob — on Titan, 102 km across, centred at 14.6° N, 150.5° E. It is the 137th largest named feature on Titan and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Wizard, leader of the Fellowship of the Ring; character from Middle-earth, the fictional setting fantasy novels by J. R. R. Tolkien. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every collis on Titan.

Feature class
a small hill or knob
Diameter
102 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
14.6° N, 150.5° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
England
Europe

What it would take to settle Gandalf Colles

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 14.6° N, 150.5° E.

Settlement difficulty here
32.9/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.3 harder than the median site
Ranked
190th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 97% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Gandalf Colles'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 collis features on Titan