Racetrack Lacuna
What Racetrack Lacuna is
Racetrack Lacuna is a lacuna — an irregular depression, read as the bed of a lake that has dried — on Titan, 9.9 km across, centred at 66.1° N, 135.1° E. It is the 287th largest named feature on Titan and the 13th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Intermittent lake (playa) in California, USA. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2010, under the theme it applies to every lacuna on Titan. Of the 13 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Australia (2), Kenya (1), India (1), Slovenia (1).
What it would take to settle Racetrack Lacuna
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 66.1° N, 135.1° E.
What this spot has going for it is water — inside the polar zone where Titan keeps its ice. What works against it is temperature — about -180 °C mean at this latitude.
Computed from Racetrack Lacuna'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 lacuna features on Titan
All 13 lacunae on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.