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Titan · Albedo Feature · 1st largest named feature

Xanadu

An imaginary country in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

What Xanadu is

Xanadu is an albedo feature — a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance — on Titan, 3,400 km across, centred at 15.0° S, 100.0° W. It is the 1st largest named feature on Titan and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

An imaginary country in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006.

Feature class
a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance
Diameter
3,400 km
about the width of the United States
Coordinates
15.0° S, 100.0° W
Planetocentric, on Titan
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
England
Europe

What it would take to settle Xanadu

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 15.0° S, 100.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
32/ 100
Typical for this world
Titan overall
32.6
0.6 easier than the median site
Ranked
23rd
of 304 named places on Titan

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 97% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Titan gets. What works against it is temperature about -179 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Xanadu'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