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Titan · Lacus · 164th largest named feature

Kivu Lacus

Lake on the border between Rwanda and The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

What Kivu Lacus is

Kivu Lacus is a lacus — a small dark plain — on Titan, 77.5 km across, centred at 87.0° N, 121.0° W. It is the 164th largest named feature on Titan and the 12th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Lake on the border between Rwanda and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2008, 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
77.5 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
87.0° N, 121.0° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2008
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Rwanda
Africa

What it would take to settle Kivu 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 87.0° N, 121.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
32.6/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
Exactly typical
Ranked
175th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is water inside the polar zone where Titan keeps its ice. What works against it is temperature about -180 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Kivu 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.