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Titan · Sinus · 169th largest named feature

Skelton Sinus

Inlet in Antarctica.

What Skelton Sinus is

Skelton Sinus is a sinus — a bay-shaped dark plain — on Titan, 73 km across, centred at 76.8° N, 45.1° E. It is the 169th largest named feature on Titan and the 21st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Inlet in Antarctica. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every sinus on Titan. Of the 28 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Canada (3), Japan (2), Namibia (1), Scotland (1).

Feature class
a bay-shaped dark plain
Diameter
73 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
76.8° N, 45.1° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
New Zealand (Antarctica)
Antarctica

What it would take to settle Skelton Sinus

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 76.8° N, 45.1° E.

Settlement difficulty here
32.6/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
Exactly typical
Ranked
144th
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 Skelton Sinus'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 sinus features on Titan

All 28 sinus on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.