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Titan · Lacus · 83rd largest named feature

Hammar Lacus

Lake in Iraq.

What Hammar Lacus is

Hammar Lacus is a lacus — a small dark plain — on Titan, 200 km across, centred at 48.6° N, 51.7° E. It is the 83rd largest named feature on Titan and the 3rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Lake in Iraq. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2013, under the theme it applies to every lacus on Titan. Of the 93 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run United States (4), Canada (3), Japan (3), China (2).

Feature class
a small dark plain
Diameter
200 km
about 1.7 times shorter than the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
48.6° N, 51.7° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2013
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Iraq
Asia

What it would take to settle Hammar Lacus

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 48.6° N, 51.7° E.

Settlement difficulty here
33.3/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
232nd
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is ground flat ground — the easiest thing to land on and build across. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Hammar Lacus'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 lacus features on Titan

All 93 lacus on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.