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Venus · Regio · 53rd largest named feature

Dione Regio

Greek Titanness; 1st wife of Zeus.

What Dione Regio is

Dione Regio is a regio — a large area distinguished by its brightness or colour — on Venus, 2,300 km across, centred at 31.5° S, 32.0° W in the Nepthys Mons quadrangle. It is the 53rd largest named feature on Venus and the 9th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Greek Titanness; 1st wife of Zeus. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1991, under the theme it applies to every regio on Venus. Of the 19 features of this class catalogued on Venus, the naming categories run Greek (7), Norse (5), American (2), Mari (1).

Feature class
a large area distinguished by its brightness or colour
Diameter
2,300 km
about the width of the Mediterranean
Coordinates
31.5° S, 32.0° W
Planetocentric, on Venus
Name approved
1991
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Nepthys Mons
Map sheet on Venus
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Dione Regio

Venus scores 43 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 31.5° S, 32.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
41.5/ 100
Typical for this world
Venus overall
43
1.5 easier than the median site
Ranked
189th
of 1,985 named places on Venus

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 85% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Venus gets. What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Dione Regio'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 Venus (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Venus 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 regio features on Venus

All 19 regiones on Venus — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.