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Venus · Mons · 760th largest named feature

Gwen Mons

Irish goddess of happiness and smiles.

What Gwen Mons is

Gwen Mons is a mons — a mountain — on Venus, 200 km across, centred at 21.4° S, 121.3° W in the Taussig quadrangle. It is the 760th largest named feature on Venus and the 71st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Irish goddess of happiness and smiles. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2003, under the theme it applies to every mons on Venus. Of the 117 features of this class catalogued on Venus, the naming categories run Greek (8), Egypt (8), Hopi (5), India (4).

Feature class
a mountain
Diameter
200 km
about 1.7 times shorter than the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
21.4° S, 121.3° W
Planetocentric, on Venus
Name approved
2003
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Taussig
Map sheet on Venus
Naming category
Celtic
Europe

What it would take to settle Gwen Mons

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 21.4° S, 121.3° W.

Settlement difficulty here
43.5/ 100
Typical for this world
Venus overall
43
0.5 harder than the median site
Ranked
1206th
of 1,985 named places on Venus

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 93% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Venus gets. What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Gwen Mons'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 mons features on Venus

All 117 montes on Venus — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.