Salusa Labyrinthus
What Salusa Labyrinthus is
Salusa Labyrinthus is a labyrinthus — a complex of intersecting valleys or ridges — on Titan, 126 km across, centred at 45.6° N, 95.8° E. It is the 119th largest named feature on Titan and the 19th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Planet from the Dune series; Salusa Secundus, used as the Imperial Prison Planet. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2017, under the theme it applies to every labyrinthus on Titan.
What it would take to settle Salusa 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 45.6° N, 95.8° E.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 74% 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 Salusa 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.