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Mars · Vallis · 184th largest named feature

Nanedi Valles

Word for "planet" in Sesotho, national language of Lesotho, Africa.

What Nanedi Valles is

Nanedi Valles is a vallis — a valley — on Mars, 550 km across, centred at 5.0° N, 48.6° W in the Lunae Palus quadrangle. It is the 184th largest named feature on Mars and the 23rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Word for "planet" in Sesotho, national language of Lesotho, Africa. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1976, under the theme it applies to every vallis on Mars. Of the 157 features of this class catalogued on Mars, the naming categories run Italy (14), France (12), Greek (10), United States (9).

Feature class
a valley
Diameter
550 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
5.0° N, 48.6° W
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
1976
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Lunae Palus
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
Lesotho
Africa

What it would take to settle Nanedi Valles

Mars scores 26.6 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 5.0° N, 48.6° W.

Settlement difficulty here
27/ 100
Typical for this world
Mars overall
26.6
0.4 harder than the median site
Ranked
1326th
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 100% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Nanedi Valles'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 Mars (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mars 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 vallis features on Mars

All 157 valles on Mars — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.