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Titan · Virga · 10th largest named feature

Hobal Virga

Arabian rain god.

What Hobal Virga is

Hobal Virga is a virga — a coloured streak — on Titan, 1,075 km across, centred at 35.0° S, 166.0° W. It is the 10th largest named feature on Titan and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Arabian 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
1,075 km
about the length of Italy
Coordinates
35.0° S, 166.0° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Arabian
Asia

What it would take to settle Hobal Virga

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 35.0° S, 166.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
33.3/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
225th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 84% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Hobal Virga'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