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Titan · Facula · 55th largest named feature

Shikoku Facula

Japanese island.

What Shikoku Facula is

Shikoku Facula is a facula — a bright spot — on Titan, 285 km across, centred at 10.4° S, 164.1° W. It is the 55th largest named feature on Titan and the 4th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Japanese island. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every facula on Titan. Of the 15 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run Greek (2), India (1), Hawaii (1), Japan (1).

Feature class
a bright spot
Diameter
285 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
10.4° S, 164.1° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Japan
Asia

What it would take to settle Shikoku Facula

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 10.4° S, 164.1° W.

Settlement difficulty here
31/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
1.6 easier than the median site
Ranked
3rd
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 99% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Shikoku Facula'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 facula features on Titan

All 15 faculae on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.