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Titan · Virga · 11th largest named feature

Perkunas Virgae

Lithuanian supreme god, ruler of rain, thunder, and lightning.

What Perkunas Virgae is

Perkunas Virgae is a virga — a coloured streak — on Titan, 980 km across, centred at 27.0° S, 162.0° W. It is the 11th largest named feature on Titan and the 3rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Lithuanian supreme god, ruler of rain, thunder, and lightning. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every virga on Titan. Of the 8 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Zuni (1), Arabian (1), Lithuania (1), New Zealand (1).

Feature class
a coloured streak
Diameter
980 km
about the length of Italy
Coordinates
27.0° S, 162.0° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Lithuania
Europe

What it would take to settle Perkunas Virgae

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 27.0° S, 162.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
32.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.1 harder than the median site
Ranked
182nd
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 90% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Perkunas Virgae'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 virga features on Titan