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Titan · Lacus · 110th largest named feature

Sionascaig Lacus

Lake in Scotland.

What Sionascaig Lacus is

Sionascaig Lacus is a lacus — a small dark plain — on Titan, 143 km across, centred at 41.5° S, 81.9° E. It is the 110th largest named feature on Titan and the 6th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Lake in Scotland. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2013, under the theme it applies to every lacus on Titan. Of the 93 features of this class catalogued on Titan, the naming categories run United States (4), Canada (3), Japan (3), China (2).

Feature class
a small dark plain
Diameter
143 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
41.5° S, 81.9° E
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2013
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Scotland
Europe

What it would take to settle Sionascaig Lacus

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 41.5° S, 81.9° E.

Settlement difficulty here
32.8/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.2 harder than the median site
Ranked
184th
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 -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Sionascaig Lacus'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 lacus features on Titan

All 93 lacus on Titan — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.