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Titan · Virga · 16th largest named feature

Uanui Virgae

Māori (New Zealand) "Great Rain" god.

What Uanui Virgae is

Uanui Virgae is a virga — a coloured streak — on Titan, 917 km across, centred at 45.2° N, 124.7° E. It is the 16th largest named feature on Titan and the 4th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Māori (New Zealand) "Great Rain" god. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2010, 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
917 km
about the length of Italy
Coordinates
45.2° N, 124.7° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2010
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
New Zealand
Oceania

What it would take to settle Uanui 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 45.2° N, 124.7° E.

Settlement difficulty here
34.3/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
1.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
273rd
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is known ground 3,689 km from Huygens (2005). What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Uanui 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