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Titan · Fretum · 174th largest named feature

Seldon Fretum

Hari Seldon, the fictional, intellectual hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series, First Minister of the Galactic Empire.

What Seldon Fretum is

Seldon Fretum is a fretum — a strait — a narrow channel connecting two larger bodies of liquid — on Titan, 67 km across, centred at 66.0° N, 43.4° E. It is the 174th largest named feature on Titan and the 4th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Hari Seldon, the fictional, intellectual hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series, First Minister of the Galactic Empire. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every fretum on Titan.

Feature class
a strait — a narrow channel connecting two larger bodies of liquid
Diameter
67 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
66.0° N, 43.4° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
United States
North America

What it would take to settle Seldon Fretum

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 66.0° N, 43.4° E.

Settlement difficulty here
33.2/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.6 harder than the median site
Ranked
217th
of 304 named places on Titan

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 Seldon Fretum'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 fretum features on Titan