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Titan · Arcus · 22nd largest named feature

Hotei Arcus

One of the seven gods of happiness in Japanese Buddhism. He is the god of contentment, good fortune, cheerfulness, and he is always smiling.

What Hotei Arcus is

Hotei Arcus is an arcus — an arc-shaped feature — on Titan, 600 km across, centred at 28.0° S, 79.0° W. It is the 22nd largest named feature on Titan and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

One of the seven gods of happiness in Japanese Buddhism. He is the god of contentment, good fortune, cheerfulness, and he is always smiling. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006.

Feature class
an arc-shaped feature
Diameter
600 km
about 1.7 times shorter than the length of Italy
Coordinates
28.0° S, 79.0° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Japan
Asia

What it would take to settle Hotei Arcus

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 28.0° S, 79.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
33.6/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
1 harder than the median site
Ranked
245th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 90% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Hotei Arcus'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