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Mercury · Vallis · 369th largest named feature

Cahokia Vallis

Cahokia Mounds, ancient city in southern Illinois, USA.

What Cahokia Vallis is

Cahokia Vallis is a vallis — a valley — on Mercury, 77 km across, centred at 65.5° N, 126.9° E in the Borealis quadrangle. It is the 369th largest named feature on Mercury and the 4th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Cahokia Mounds, ancient city in southern Illinois, USA. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2013, under the theme it applies to every vallis on Mercury. Of the 5 features of this class catalogued on Mercury, the naming categories run Algeria (1), Italy (1), Cambodia (1), United States (1).

Feature class
a valley
Diameter
77 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
65.5° N, 126.9° E
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
2013
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Borealis
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
United States
North America

What it would take to settle Cahokia Vallis

Mercury scores 46 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 65.5° N, 126.9° E.

Settlement difficulty here
48.8/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Mercury overall
46
2.8 harder than the median site
Ranked
593rd
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is temperature about 102 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Cahokia Vallis's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 68% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 3 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mercury (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mercury 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 vallis features on Mercury