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Europa · Fossa · 45th largest named feature

Maughanasilly Fossa

Stone row in County Cork, Ireland.

What Maughanasilly Fossa is

Maughanasilly Fossa is a fossa — a long, narrow depression — on Europa, 920 km across, centred at 34.2° S, 155.2° W. It is the 45th largest named feature on Europa and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Stone row in County Cork, Ireland. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2019, under the theme it applies to every fossa on Europa. Of the 6 features of this class catalogued on Europa, the naming categories run Ireland (3), France (3).

Feature class
a long, narrow depression
Diameter
920 km
about the length of Italy
Coordinates
34.2° S, 155.2° W
Planetocentric, on Europa
Name approved
2019
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Ireland
Europe

What it would take to settle Maughanasilly Fossa

Europa scores 60.9 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 34.2° S, 155.2° W.

Settlement difficulty here
61/ 100
Typical for this world
Europa overall
60.9
0.1 harder than the median site
Ranked
70th
of 129 named places on Europa

What this spot has going for it is water same as everywhere else on this world. What works against it is temperature about -159 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Maughanasilly Fossa's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 84% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Europa (earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Europa 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 fossa features on Europa