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Titan · Mare · 43rd largest named feature

Punga Mare

Māori (New Zealand) supernatural being, the father of sharks and lizards. Son of the sea god Tangaroa.

What Punga Mare is

Punga Mare is a mare — a large dark plain — an ancient lava flood, not a sea — on Titan, 380 km across, centred at 85.1° N, 20.3° E. It is the 43rd largest named feature on Titan and the 3rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Māori (New Zealand) supernatural being, the father of sharks and lizards. Son of the sea god Tangaroa. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2008, under the theme it applies to every mare on Titan. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Norway (1), Greek (1), New Zealand (1).

Feature class
a large dark plain — an ancient lava flood, not a sea
Diameter
380 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
85.1° N, 20.3° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2008
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
New Zealand
Oceania

What it would take to settle Punga Mare

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 85.1° N, 20.3° E.

Settlement difficulty here
32.4/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.2 easier than the median site
Ranked
100th
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 -180 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Punga Mare'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 mare features on Titan