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Titan · Macula · 99th largest named feature

Ganesa Macula

Hindu god of good fortune and wisdom.

What Ganesa Macula is

Ganesa Macula is a macula — a dark spot — on Titan, 160 km across, centred at 50.0° N, 87.3° W. It is the 99th largest named feature on Titan and the 5th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Hindu god of good fortune and wisdom. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every macula on Titan. Of the 7 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Slavic (2), Greek (1), Aztec (1), India (1).

Feature class
a dark spot
Diameter
160 km
about 1.6 times the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
50.0° N, 87.3° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
India
Asia

What it would take to settle Ganesa Macula

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 50.0° N, 87.3° W.

Settlement difficulty here
34/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
1.4 harder than the median site
Ranked
267th
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 Ganesa Macula'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 macula features on Titan