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Titan · Unda · 32nd largest named feature

Aura Undae

Greek Titanis goddess of the morning wind.

What Aura Undae is

Aura Undae is an unda — a dune field — on Titan, 490 km across, centred at 13.8° N, 133.1° E. It is the 32nd largest named feature on Titan and the 3rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Greek Titanis goddess of the morning wind. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every unda on Titan. Of the 6 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Greek (5), Mayan (1).

Feature class
a dune field
Diameter
490 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
13.8° N, 133.1° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Aura Undae

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 13.8° N, 133.1° E.

Settlement difficulty here
32.4/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.2 easier than the median site
Ranked
76th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 97% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Aura Undae'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 unda features on Titan