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Titan · Flumen · 292nd largest named feature

Saraswati Flumen

A river in Hindu mythology.

What Saraswati Flumen is

Saraswati Flumen is a flumen — a channel that carries, or once carried, a liquid — on Titan, 2.9 km across, centred at 74.6° S, 166.5° E. It is the 292nd largest named feature on Titan and the 11th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

A river in Hindu mythology. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every flumen on Titan. Of the 11 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Greek (4), Norse (2), Hebrew (1), Jewish (1).

Feature class
a channel that carries, or once carried, a liquid
Diameter
2.9 km
about 1.7 times shorter than a 5 km run
Coordinates
74.6° S, 166.5° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Hindu
Asia

What it would take to settle Saraswati Flumen

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 74.6° S, 166.5° E.

Settlement difficulty here
33.5/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.9 harder than the median site
Ranked
243rd
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 Saraswati Flumen'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 flumen features on Titan

All 11 flumina on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.