ライブ
Titan · Planitia · 2nd largest named feature

Caladan Planitia

Planet from the Dune series; the original home of the House Atriedes, a fictional noble family.

What Caladan Planitia is

Caladan Planitia is a planitia — a low plain — on Titan, 2,800 km across, centred at 31.0° N, 134.0° E. It is the 2nd largest named feature on Titan and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Planet from the Dune series; the original home of the House Atriedes, a fictional noble family. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2014, under the theme it applies to every planitia on Titan.

Feature class
a low plain
Diameter
2,800 km
about the width of the Mediterranean
Coordinates
31.0° N, 134.0° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2014
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
United States
North America

What it would take to settle Caladan Planitia

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 31.0° N, 134.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
31.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.9 easier than the median site
Ranked
17th
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is ground flat ground — the easiest thing to land on and build across. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Caladan Planitia'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 planitia features on Titan

All 10 planitiae on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.