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Titan · Planitia · 52nd largest named feature

Giedi Planitia

Planet from the Dune series; Giedi Prime is the homeworld of House Harkonnen.

What Giedi Planitia is

Giedi Planitia is a planitia — a low plain — on Titan, 303 km across, centred at 5.2° N, 3.0° E. It is the 52nd largest named feature on Titan and the 8th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Planet from the Dune series; Giedi Prime is the homeworld of House Harkonnen. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2017, under the theme it applies to every planitia on Titan.

Feature class
a low plain
Diameter
303 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
5.2° N, 3.0° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2017
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
United States
North America

What it would take to settle Giedi Planitia

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 5.2° N, 3.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
31.2/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
1.4 easier than the median site
Ranked
6th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 100% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Giedi Planitia'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 planitia features on Titan

All 10 planitiae on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.