Menat Undae
What Menat Undae is
Menat Undae is an unda — a dune field — on Venus, 100 km across, centred at 24.8° S, 20.6° W in the Carson quadrangle. It is the 964th largest named feature on Venus and the 2nd largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Arabian desert goddess. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1994, under the theme it applies to every unda on Venus.
What it would take to settle Menat Undae
Venus scores 43 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 24.8° S, 20.6° W.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 91% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Venus gets. What works against it is water — same as everywhere else on this world.
Computed from Menat Undae'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 Venus (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Venus 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.