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Ganymede · Crater · 68th largest named feature

Selket

Tutelary goddess who guarded intestines of the dead.

What Selket is

Selket is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Ganymede, 168 km across, centred at 15.0° N, 105.7° W. It is the 68th largest named feature on Ganymede and the 11th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Tutelary goddess who guarded intestines of the dead. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1985, under the theme it applies to every crater on Ganymede. Of the 129 features of this class catalogued on Ganymede, the naming categories run Egypt (42), Assyro-Babylonian (30), Phoenician (18), Sumerian (16).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
168 km
about 1.7 times the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
15.0° N, 105.7° W
Planetocentric, on Ganymede
Name approved
1985
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Egypt
Africa

What it would take to settle Selket

Ganymede scores 55 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° N, 105.7° W.

Settlement difficulty here
53.9/ 100
Typical for this world
Ganymede overall
55
1.1 easier than the median site
Ranked
44th
of 196 named places on Ganymede

What this spot has going for it is radiation geometry under closed field lines, the shielded part of the only magnetosphere on any moon. What works against it is temperature about -157 °C mean at this latitude.

Computed from Selket'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 Ganymede (earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Ganymede 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 crater features on Ganymede

All 129 craters on Ganymede — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.