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Titan · Virga · 23rd largest named feature

Tlaloc Virgae

Aztec rain god.

What Tlaloc Virgae is

Tlaloc Virgae is a virga — a coloured streak — on Titan, 600 km across, centred at 23.7° N, 152.3° E. It is the 23rd largest named feature on Titan and the 6th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Aztec rain god. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every virga on Titan. Of the 8 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Zuni (1), Arabian (1), Lithuania (1), New Zealand (1).

Feature class
a coloured streak
Diameter
600 km
about 1.7 times shorter than the length of Italy
Coordinates
23.7° N, 152.3° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Aztec
North America

What it would take to settle Tlaloc Virgae

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 23.7° N, 152.3° E.

Settlement difficulty here
33/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.4 harder than the median site
Ranked
200th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 93% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Tlaloc Virgae'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 virga features on Titan