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Ganymede · Catena · 50th largest named feature

Terah Catena

Phoenician moon god who battled with Keret in Negeb.

What Terah Catena is

Terah Catena is a catena — a chain of craters — on Ganymede, 283 km across, centred at 7.1° N, 82.4° E. It is the 50th largest named feature on Ganymede and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Phoenician moon god who battled with Keret in Negeb. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2000, under the theme it applies to every catena on Ganymede. Of the 4 features of this class catalogued on Ganymede, the naming categories run Assyro-Babylonian (2), Phoenician (1), Egypt (1).

Feature class
a chain of craters
Diameter
283 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
7.1° N, 82.4° E
Planetocentric, on Ganymede
Name approved
2000
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Phoenician
Asia

What it would take to settle Terah Catena

Ganymede scores 55 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 7.1° N, 82.4° E.

Settlement difficulty here
54.3/ 100
Typical for this world
Ganymede overall
55
0.7 easier than the median site
Ranked
72nd
of 196 named places on Ganymede

What this spot has going for it is radiation geometry under closed field lines, the shielded part of the only magnetosphere on any moon. What works against it is temperature about -156 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Terah Catena's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 84% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Ganymede (earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Ganymede 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 catena features on Ganymede