लाइव
Titan · Labyrinthus · 81st largest named feature

Richese Labyrinthus

Planet from the Dune series; fourth planet of Eridani A, supreme in machine culture, noted for miniaturization.

What Richese Labyrinthus is

Richese Labyrinthus is a labyrinthus — a complex of intersecting valleys or ridges — on Titan, 200 km across, centred at 41.8° N, 161.0° E. It is the 81st largest named feature on Titan and the 13th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Planet from the Dune series; fourth planet of Eridani A, supreme in machine culture, noted for miniaturization. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2014, under the theme it applies to every labyrinthus on Titan.

Feature class
a complex of intersecting valleys or ridges
Diameter
200 km
about 1.7 times shorter than the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
41.8° N, 161.0° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2014
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
United States
North America

What it would take to settle Richese Labyrinthus

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 41.8° N, 161.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
35.6/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Titan overall
32.6
3 harder than the median site
Ranked
296th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 78% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is ground broken ground — hard to reach, and worth reaching for the shelter and the exposed strata.

Computed from Richese Labyrinthus'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 labyrinthus features on Titan

All 25 labyrinthi on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.