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Titan · Albedo Feature

Quivira

Legendary city in the American Southwest; site of a fabulous treasure sought by Coronado and other explorers.

What Quivira is

Quivira is an albedo feature — a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance — on Titan, centred at 0.0° N, 15.0° W.

Where the name comes from

Legendary city in the American Southwest; site of a fabulous treasure sought by Coronado and other explorers. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006.

Feature class
a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance
Diameter
Not catalogued
Coordinates
0.0° N, 15.0° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
United States
North America

What it would take to settle Quivira

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 0.0° N, 15.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
32/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.6 easier than the median site
Ranked
31st
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 Quivira'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 albedo feature features on Titan